Is it possible to set up printing first page of my document N times? And I don't want to change the page numbers for the following pages...

xss,

Well, if you just need two or three copies and it's always going to be the same number, you could make your page an overlay, and just create as many physical pages that you need, and just have them display the overlay(meaning you only have to change one overlay to make change to your pages). This is an easy way to do it.

If you need a lot of copies, or if the number of copies can change from data file to data file, you may need a different approach. First, create a virtual page, and put everything the first page needs to have on it. (in fact, you can just turn your current page1 into a virtual page) Then, create a normal page, and in it's basic attributes, uncheck "Page ejects". Make sure this new page is the first one in your list of pages in the Document Structure.

All this page will have is a single PressTalk object that will call your virtual page and display it on the screen. Create the PressTalk object, set it's top and left position to 0. It will have the following code:



This will display the virtual page "n" number of times. In this example, n is equal to 3, but you can change it to whatever you need. You will also have to replace $Page1 by whatever name you gave to your virtual page, which may not necessarely be Page1.

The advantage to this method is that you can use a data selection for the value of n. So if the number of copies is in your data, you can call it. So if we assume that it's on your second line of data, between columns 3 and 5, you could use this for the value of n:



This will take the value from your data. So one record could have 5 copies, another 20, another 500, another just a single, etc...

This is a slightly more complex, but more efficient way to do it. After that, you just need to create the other pages normally like you always do.

Hope that helps!

Regards,
Raphaël Lalonde Lefebvre

Thank you, Raphaël!

I will try the second way and let you know. Actually I already have a separate virtual page for the first page, so I won't worry about the page numbers...

Hi Raphaël,

I got some issues here:

- if n is 3, I got 4 pages shown in my PP workspace and preview, which is OK. I can use n-1. But worse thing is that the last page partly overlapped with my next different page...

- For the first page, I actually have two pages from the overlay, one with watermark on it when condition met. In my workspace and preview, only last page (in case n=3, the 4th page) has watermark, not the first three...Is it because the watermark page is second not the first page? and again, the 4th page overlapped with my next different page

Is there a way to fix it?

Thanks,

Sandra

Hi Raphaël,

I have split the first page from other pages, so I won't have that overlapping problem. Besides, the watermark was my fault, I put it in wrong place.

Now my problem is how to control how many pages shown. If I use solution above, and n=3, then I have 4 copies in my workspace and 7 in my preview. If instead, I use n-2, when n=3, I got 4 in workspace and 3 in preview, which seems fine. However, if n=4, I got 3 and 5 respectively, while n=5, 4 and 7 respectively Is there any rounding here?

Thanks,

Sandra

Hi Raphaël,

Since I have split the page, I used the number of copies function in PP workflow, so my problem has been solved. However, still wondering why the number of copies in design is not as expected...

Thanks,

Sandra

Sandra,

I've tested the code I've sent you again, and that worked fine. I get whatever number of copies that I specify.

Did you make sure that the runpage is set to not eject, and that it calls a virtual page? Otherwise, you may be getting extra pages due to PlanetPress executing the page normally in addition to calling it through PressTalk.

Regards,
Raphaël Lalonde Lefebvre

Hi Raphaël,

I did, but I only looked at my workspace and preview to see how many copies I got. Probably printing would be different?

Thanks,

Sandra