Sadly it's not very usable for more serious image personalisation at the moment.
So here are some of my ideas for improving it further:
- At the moment PL does not remember the data file used, so it must be selected again every time I reopen the document, or even when I close the Serial Document window. Not good !
- If a data field is empty for some records then the <<some data field name>> is shown instead. There should at least be an option to leave it blank.
- The only possible way to get the final result is to create a PL document with the number of pages in the data file. With A4 pages containing high resolution images it is not a good idea to create a 4000 page document
. There should be an option to otput directly to PDF, so every page wouldn't have to be in memory, but could be just written to disk. Also sending directly to print would be a good idea. Or a document with "virtual" pages, that would be created only when you ask to see it, that would also avoid having to spend hours generating the huge document. - A more advanced functionality would be to support the so called "background image" in PDF files, so the static image would need to be in PDF only once, and every page would contain only the changing part of the page (assuming the text does not cover all of the page).
At the moment I just can't honestly say that the Serial Text feature is up to the task to deal with larger projects.
Thanks,
Rainer