General tab

To produce a PDF or TIFF rendition, the basic process is to run a program that can print the document, a special Content Manager print driver is used to capture the output. In general, the Windows associated application is used for printing if it has been installed, if that is not available, the generic Content Manager viewers are used to do the printing. The General tab allows an organization to suspend specific Rendering processes for the selected dataset from a single dialog, as well as options to control the way this algorithm works for certain file types.

  • Suspend render processing on this dataset for:
    • PDF (longevity) rendering
    • Generating PDF rendering requests
    • Optical Character recognition
    • Signed copy generation (DocuSign)
  • Where possible, use Onstream Trapeze to create PDF/A-2u compliant PDF - select this option to produce a PDF/A-2u compliant PDF file for most Microsoft Office formations and any non-compliant PDF files. Other formats such as text, images, etc., or if this option is not selected, PDF renditions will be produced as a PDF/A-1b documents.
  • For Microsoft Office documents, use automation to produce PDF renditions - this option currently supports Word, Excel and .TXT files. If a copy of Word / Excel is installed on the render server, and the file being rendered would normally be opened by Word or Excel, then Content Manager will use Office Automation code to open the document within that application and instruct the app to save it to PDF. This will result in much quicker rendering times and also will produce much smaller PDF documents than using the PDF printer driver. The resulting PDF is a “vector” based PDF rather than the rasterized bitmap produced by the TRIM PDF printer driver. This has the added advantage of making the text inside the PDF searchable and index-able.

    NOTE: In some server environments, this automation may not work, and that Microsoft generally discourage using automation in server-side environments.

  • For text files, use the standard Shell Print command - enable this option to print simple text files using the Windows Explorer Print verb, otherwise the text will be printed by special Content Manager code that reads the text, formats it into lines and send the output to the standard print spooler. The Content Manager print spooler picks up the output, regardless of how it is generated, and saves it as a PDF file.
  • Convert EML mail messages to HTML - select this option to run EML mail messages through the Content Manager HTML conversion utility prior to being printed to the Content Manager print spooler. If not enabled, the EML file is printed using the standard Content Manager EML viewer.
  • Heading displayed on IE Print Dialog - for some document formats, Internet Explorer (IE) is chosen as the desired printing application. IE can pop up a print options dialog which prevents server-side automated printing. To overcome this, the Render engine looks for this popup window whilst waiting for printing to complete – if it finds it, the dialog is automatically processed. The popup window is found by looking for the heading caption on the dialog. Normally this will be “Print”, however it may have a different caption in some server environments. If your server environment has a different print dialog header, type your IE print dialog header in this option.