FrameMaker Photo "Watermark" Plug-in?

[CPG-user]

A few years ago we had a very large catalog that included thousands of photos. Our customer requested a log book of all photos and

corresponding file name for each photo. To create a "scatter" proof like this would take several days. I believe we purchased a plug-in at the time that allowed us to "watermark" each photo in the file but this is long gone. This plug-in simply printed the name of the photo as a watermark on top of each photo. I can't find any information on-line regarding this and I'm hoping somebody might have some information on this? Thanks in advance!

[Invitado]

I use Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro to watermark all docs and photos. I suggest creating a folder(s) containing X number of photos (you may have some memory size issues), then use 9 Pro to combine all the photos into a single file. Finally,use 9 Pro to watermark the entire file.and save it. 

[Bob_Niland]

I use Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro to watermark all docs and photos.

Can Acrobat establish a unique ID for each image in a PDF?
(the import file name is presumably gone by then)

Can you then provide Acro a list of text strings to WM into each image?

[Invitado]

Unfortunately, no. The combined photos become one file with one name, but can be extracted individually and given file names.

Ron Tillotson

Technical Writer

[Bob_Niland]

I've only ever done this in small numbers, by hand. It strikes me that there are two major ways to go.

Frame watermark

You can probably write (possibly obtain) a script that merely discovers the imported image file names, and then places that text over each image, perhaps as an outline font, perhaps as a translucent eps. Issues include:

• It will be on a layer, and could easily be removed.
• It won't be a real watermark (a modification of the image data).
• The more like a real WM you try to make it, the more difficult the script.

Image watermark

Search the web on
"photoshop batch watermark".
This may be the way to go. Be sure to work on copies of the images, and not the originals.

[Invitado]

From your description I wasn't clear whether the current project itself required the watermark effect or whether that just happened to be a feature of the long-ago plug-in. Is the watermark intended to be a security feature, i.e. so that the pictures can't be readily mis-used, or was it just for displaying the name, in which case another position around the picture would be acceptable?

It would be possible to have a script to create such a log book, either  as a scripting batch pre-process outside of FM to create a MIF file or by using  Framescript. Either way would not be too onerous at all.

edit: it's also very possible toadd "features" to such a log book such as a hyperlinked, alphabetical index or other indexes, or TOCs, to assist the reader in locating specific items.

Sheila

Message was edited by: Sheila Carlisle

[CPG-user]

The "goal" of the watermark is simply to identify each photo by it's file name. This watermark would not print in the final print file. We'd print out one or two copies with the watermarks in place to simply have a complete reference of all photos and their names.

[Invitado]

There are sample MIF files that come with FM, usually installed into some directory such as \samples (on Windows) which are ususally within the FM install directory.

I seem to recall that some versions of FM neglected to include the MIF samples, though, and they were posted on the Adobe site, but I don't see them on the downloads page:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=22&platform=Windows

An absolutely fabulous freebie MIF viewer is MIFBrowse, by Graham Wideman, here:

MIFBrowser Wideman

As the samples show, a MIF file can be very minimalist -- it can contain mostly just the data, and the actual layout can be maintained as a separate "template" file that is referenced by path\name in the data file, so FM combines the two when the data MIF is opened in FM. This is documented in the MIF reference, in the Chapter 2 section "Including template files".

Here's one (defpage.mif), and even this is far more verbose with comments than is actually needed.

<MIFFile 8.00> # hand generated
<TextFlow                     # All document text is in this text flow.
<TFTag `A'>                  # Make this a tagged text flow.
<TFAutoConnect Yes>          # Automatically connect text frames.
<Para
  <ParaLine
   <String `This paragraph appears on a body page within a'>
   <String ` text flow tagged A.'>
  > # end of ParaLine
> # end of Para
> # end of TextFlow
# End of MIFFile

In your case you'd be having whatever content and formatting you decided on, e.g. if you wanted the graphics to be in individual anchored frames, or be inserted into table cells, you'd have that MIF code wrapped around the data.

A good way to start is to create a page in FM, say with a table with one row, two cells, with the graphics inserted as referenced files. Use only the default table name (Format A) and default paragraph styles, don't do anything else except type in the graphic names somewhere so that you have a search term to use when looking at the MIF.  Then save that as .fm and .mif, and open the MIF in a good text editor (e.g. NotePad++, EmEditor, there are many others; although MIF can be opened in FM for editing, I find it far from user friendly to work in FM that way).

The MIF reference has many examples to show how the various features such as a table and rows and cells should be specified, and  examples of referenced graphics, too.

It's impossible to explain working with MIF in a forum posting like this, but it's absolutely entirely do-able to have a scripting program create a list of filenames and then add the necessary MIF statements around each one to create a viable MIF file.

Or, as I mentioned, using Framescript to do this is definitely possible too, either way would end up being very similar in action. More info on Framescript at

http://www.framescript.com and on the user group

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/framescript-users/

And, you could have the script create one file with the watermark names, another without, or have it add things like an alphabetical index of filenames or TOC or whatever with page numbers, so users would have an easy way to find the graphics either in a printed form of in a PDF form.

And, another bonus, one foot into MIF means you might even want to get into database publishing or automated publishing with FrameMaker, so when your catalogs need to be updated this photo document can be updated too 🙂

Sheila