Create Serial Documents (guide)

[csanchez]

This is a simple guide on how to create documents in series. It is a really useful function of PhotoLine that unfortunately I couldn't find very well documented, although it is quite easy to use, there may be more people who, like me, have no idea how to use it.

For this example, we will start by creating a simple image with a text layer with the text "Number: "


Next, we will indicate to PhotoLine that we want to create a serial document.
Layout > Text > Serial Document...


For this example, I will simply use a plain text file with a number that I want to be different in each document, one piece of data per line, where the first line is the reference name for all the data, in this case "num".


Keep in mind that in addition to *.TXT files, PhotoLine can also use *.CSV files, which are ideally better for handling different data groups.


In the "Serial Document" window, we will select the file with the data we will use.
We will select the "Data Field" to use, and making sure to have the text cursor where we want the data from the "Data Sets" to be entered, we press "Set".
PhotoLine will enter a «TAG» that it will use as a reference to create the documents with the corresponding "Data Set".
Finally, we press "Create Serial Document" to create them.


You will see something like this, a new document with multiple pages, where each page contains the corresponding "Data Set"


If you don't see the panel with the list of pages, you can view the panel using the option "View > Panel > Page List"

You can manually make any changes you want on each of the pages if necessary.

Now we need to save all the pages separately.
Select the option "Layout > Page > Save Page(s)..."


You will see a "Save As..." window, we select from which page to which we want to be saved.
For this example, I will save everything as *.PLD, I will select from the first to the last page (page number 21) and I will check the "Single Page" option since I need each page to be a new document.


Once saved, we will see that we have each of the pages in a new document in the selected folder.


Now we can convert all these documents to the format we need, we can do it using the "Batch Converting" function of PhotoLine.
File > Functions > Batch Converting...


We only need to select the source folder, the type of image we want to convert, the destination folder, and the type of image to convert to.


And that would be all, we can see in the selected folder that we have all the images created from the serial document.