A couple of questions, mostly about contact sheets

[C.Prettyman]

I've had, and used xn-view for my own use now for quite some time, and love it, but now I am evaluating it as a possible tool for the company where I work. From what I see, there is a bit of a shortcoming relative to teh companies needs (which differ from my personal needs), and I'm wondering if I am simply missing something, or if these issues can be addressed.

The issues all center around contact sheets. The ideal application for my office would let select a template (the details of which I control) for a contact sheet, and then add all of the images in a selected folder, or specific images, into that contact sheet, and print it. Since this is all done for printing, however, I need the margins, and image sizes, etc, to be controlled in some unit other than pixels. Since I am in the US, inches would be preferred. Obviously, having metric units as well would increase the usability.

I also need the ability to pick specific thumbnails in the contact sheet, and rotate them. And, being able to re-arrange them would be very usefull as well.

Lastly, the option to save the contact sheets as PDF, rather than a raster image format would be great.

Most of these features are available in some of the "photo album" applications that are available - but those never have the other features I need, which XN-View does so well. THe one feature I have neot found yet is being able to creae preset templaets. I have a couple of departemtns, all of which have their own requirements. One wants 6 images per page, with filenames and dates, another wants 2 images per page, with filenames only, etc. I'd love to be able create these presets, and name them for the departments, to make life as simple as possible for the staff.

On another topic - one of the things that makes XNview so usefull to us is the ability to export information to a text file. But, it seems to be pretty pre-set what is exported. Is it possible to have more control over this. I'd like, for example, to be able to export the full path, not just the file name.

Lastly, just out of curiosity, what is the relationship between XN-View, and XN-view Deluxe?

[helmut]

Mr. Prettyman, your long post with several questions gives us a bit hard time answering (see Rules and Guidelines in the XnView Newsgroups). But I try...

... The issues all center around contact sheets. The ideal application for my office would let select a template (the details of which I control) for a contact sheet, and then add all of the images in a selected folder, or specific images, into that contact sheet, and print it. Since this is all done for printing, however, I need the margins, and image sizes, etc, to be controlled in some unit other than pixels. Since I am in the US, inches would be preferred. Obviously, having metric units as well would increase the usability....

From what I can see, the issue is not all around contact sheets, but all around printing. In XnView DeLuxe there are several predefined templates available for printing, this is not in XnView 1.66, yet. Not sure when this will make it in XnView.

I also need the ability to pick specific thumbnails in the contact sheet, and rotate them. And, being able to re-arrange them would be very usefull as well.

O.k., this is really more than the printing feature does. I assume that the rotating is because of the wrong orientation of digital photos taken in portrait orientation. Right?

Lastly, the option to save the contact sheets as PDF, rather than a raster image format would be great.

Good point. Again, XnView DeLuxe can create PDFs from images. XnView (Free) cannot do this, yet, sorry.

...The one feature I have neot found yet is being able to creae preset templaets. I have a couple of departemtns, all of which have their own requirements. One wants 6 images per page, with filenames and dates, another wants 2 images per page, with filenames only, etc. I'd love to be able create these presets, and name them for the departments, to make life as simple as possible for the staff.

Sounds good to me. Again this is more a printing issue, I think, but user-defined templated would be really cool.

On another topic - one of the things that makes XNview so usefull to us is the ability to export information to a text file. But, it seems to be pretty pre-set what is exported. Is it possible to have more control over this. I'd like, for example, to be able to export the full path, not just the file name.

There is a post regarding this in the French newsgroup. Think you can follow the post although it is in French (one longer contribution is in English.) See Générer une liste de fichiers

Lastly, just out of curiosity, what is the relationship between XN-View, and XN-view Deluxe?

XnView DeLuxe is the commercial version of XnView. Basically, XnView DeLuxe is a superset of XnView, with some nice extra features. If you are interested have a look at the trial version, which you can download at http://www.xzeos.net/index_uk.htm.

[C.Prettyman]

Thank you for wading through my long post. Yes, it is fair to categorize my issues as printing issues. In my office's parlance, we refer to the printed output as the contact sheets, and in fact, we generally urge people not to save them as files. While saving is a nice option, my needs are best addressed by a printing process that sends multiple images to print on one page.

I will look at the post you reccomend, my French is quite rusty, but we have staff who are from France, presumably their French is better.

Thanks again.