smartmarks incompatibility?

[pnamajck]

mac-osx 10.6.8 (snow leopard)
preps5.3.3 (build 595)
preps7.1.1 (build 106)

before 7.1 was installed … created smartmarks within 5.3 … applied smartmarks (template/import-smartmarks) … world continued revolving. since 7.1 was installed, create add'l smartmarks within 7.1 … again, no issue and no errors.

sometimes it still is necessary to build some templates using 5.3 … now, when applying smartmarks … error-message appears (for each offending mark) … "araxipreps:marks:smartmarks:ETC.smk" is not a valid smartmark file". if there are 28 invalid smartmarks … am met with 28 error-messages.

[ seems, prior to the release-notes of 5.0.3, there had been issues with the smartmark interface not appearing … if there were invalid marks residing in the smartmarks folder … that issue was resolved (23992). ]

have others come across the issue of 7.1 smart-marks being incompatible within 5.3 … and, if so, do they just grin 'n bear it … or have they adopted a user-friendly work-around?

p.s.
above-mentioned ETC indicates any specific smartmark(and sub-folder).

 

[Joe]

Smartmarks changed from 5 to 6 I think. If you ran the migration utility when you upgraded to 7 it would have converted the old smartmarks to the new ones. If you are now creating templates in 5 and trying to use them in 7.1 the smartmarks won't be compatible...as you've noticed. Why are you still creating templates in 5?

 

[pnamajck]

sorry, the issue is not about migrating preps-5 templates to preps-7 … kodak gives us their migration utility for this. perhaps i didn't make my thoughts clear.

• importing smartmarks, created in 5 or 7, within preps7 has no issue.
• importing smartmarks, created in 7, within preps5 has the issue.

as to why some templates are still created in 5 is beyond my control (others in the department have not yet made the transition) … thanks.

 

[Joe]

Sorry for the confusion and yes, smartmarks in 7 are not compatible with 5. I doubt if there is a work around for this.

 

[Glenn McDowall]

We have a similar set up, We are 90-95% template based using signature selection rather than putting together fresh impositions for each job. Whilst Preps 7 is superior for quickly editing or even building fresh impositions, for me it falls down at the Save As Template stage, because it doesn't remember the Template name. For this reason its safer for me to build New size Templates with Preps 5. The few that are built in Preps 7 I name as such because if you try to open these in Preps 5 a lot of the marks won't work.
So to your error message, I get that when adding smart marks in Preps 5 but only for one mark (not 28), however I have saved many smart marks with Preps 7, just a long shot but because in Preps 7 you can access individual marks from inside Groups (Folders) my Preps 7 generated Smart Marks are organised into Folders e.g. Colour Bars, Text Marks, Perfector, Ganging..., I'm wondering if because Preps 5 can only see these Folders as Groups if that is reducing my error message count?
It may also be possible to point one of the Preps to a different default Marks folder on the server, but not sure if this would mess with Prinergy signature selection?

 

[Joe]

We have a similar set up, We are 90-95% template based using signature selection rather than putting together fresh impositions for each job. Whilst Preps 7 is superior for quickly editing or even building fresh impositions, for me it falls down at the Save As Template stage, because it doesn't remember the Template name. For this reason its safer for me to build New size Templates with Preps 5. The few that are built in Preps 7 I name as such because if you try to open these in Preps 5 a lot of the marks won't work.
So to your error message, I get that when adding smart marks in Preps 5 but only for one mark (not 28), however I have saved many smart marks with Preps 7, just a long shot but because in Preps 7 you can access individual marks from inside Groups (Folders) my Preps 7 generated Smart Marks are organised into Folders e.g. Colour Bars, Text Marks, Perfector, Ganging..., I'm wondering if because Preps 5 can only see these Folders as Groups if that is reducing my error message count?
It may also be possible to point one of the Preps to a different default Marks folder on the server, but not sure if this would mess with Prinergy signature selection?

If you are editing an existing template and want to overwrite it you can navigate to the correct folder and click the name of the template and it will fill that name in and then overwrite the file. It's not as good as remembering the template name but it is better than trying to remember the exact name of a template as they tend to have long names (for us at least).

 

[Glenn McDowall]

We name Preps 5 templates
"page size_binding", (for popular sizes we'll split each into three or four colour bar types.)
inside there can be many signatures with individual names.
You can navigate and select fairly quickly with Prinergy Selection.

With Preps 7 we ran into several problems, you can't navigate to the signature name when saving only the template name, multiple signatures inside a single template is tricky to visualise the numbering especially SaddleStitch. We really needed to name each Template with just one Signature and so as you say the filename gets quite long, and then just to further complicate things We are trying to automate Prinergy's signature selection via JDF, which means ALL our jdf Templates have to be named exactly as defined in the jdf and ALL in the same place, you can imagine with 3colour bars 3 sheet sizes, Sheetwork, perfector Turn Tumble you can end up with tens/hundreds the same size and thousands in the same folder. I have pretty much given up trying to navigate that folder manually.

 

[Joe]

We keep all of our templates with only one imposition per template and we name the imposition the same as the template all stored in folders named for press-page count-binding style, etc...That way we can name the imposition in the run list, copy the name, Save As Template and then paste the name of the imposition we had just copied and then navigate to the correct folder to save in. Right now our templates folder has 137 folders for the different presses and in those are all of the templates related to that particular folder name. We have a lot of templates but it keeps it pretty manageable this way.

 

[JimBob53]

In Preps out templates are named by the press, trim size, number of colors, 1-side or two, and work-back or work-tumble. This seems to work well for us, we can easily fined templates for repeat jobs.

 

[pnamajck]

It may also be possible to point one of the Preps to a different default Marks folder on the server, but not sure if this would mess with Prinergy signature selection?

hey, glenn … i revisited your suggx for alternative marks location (preferences) … with my circumstances, this seems to be a viable option. created parent-folder "preps53" within the araxipreps directory … only two child-folders (marks, templates) reside within the parent-folder … and, in this case, removed those 30+ offending marks. prinergy seemed to respect this provenance during media output … all is well.

again, glenn … thanks for your suggx.