Fancy Product Designer Multistep Product Configurator
I 100% agree with this, more, I 10000% agree with what Paulo just wrote.
In regards to an earlier question, we are exactly doing what he describes, we remove certain layers, then export everything with factor 8 before applying a Photoshop automation that aligns, resizes and crops the picture to size (= bounding box). And actually, there should be no need to do any of this, FPD should have an option to specify the export area, resolution, layers to export and then generate a print-ready file, that should be the essence of every design tool. And obviously, there should be an option to save those per product, not just as a global setting.
Alex
Hi everybody.
This thread is very important for the professional store owner that sells personalized products, or any kind of real world manufacturing based on the client design. I leave here my two cents.
- Production ready PDF:
I have the exact same problem.
We need the product artwork in vector format. We have tried every possible option with PDF, PNG, etc. The closest we get is to create an SVG but it simply opens a new window in the browser with no way to get the SVG. We have used Chrome's option to output a PDF but the PDF is not the correct size and in one test a logo was slightly shifted. In another test, the font did not work. I would like to stick with FPD if there is going to be an update soon to fix this. Does anyone know of a way to get vector artwork out of FPD? I dont care if it is PDF or SVG I just need vector art or this is not usable.
Alexander: how do you do it then? When I try to export any type of svg files, it does not work properly at all. Do you have the same problem? Or are you able to at least export svg images/pdfs?
Well, we print tens of thousands of custom designs based on FPD so it does work for a relatively professional business as well - but it required constant refining, we can't export them in print-ready formats but have to use PS actions to post-process the results, which is a shame.
And to be fair, the WP designers do cost way less than some of the plugins in Magento I also took into consideration, and most of those plugins to feature better backends, more automation etc. But that's not too much of an excuse not to improve the backend - if a programmer offers a Magento plugin for $500 with advanced features and he sells 100 of those, he makes a turnover of $50,000. If someone produces a WP-plugin for $40 and it sells 2000 times, the turnover reaches $80,000 - so that doesn't explain why one plugin turns out to be more advanced than the other (and there are far more Magento product designers, so the market is much more competitive).
Anyway, let's hope someone reads this and maybe even gets the idea to ask some customers who use the designer on a professional basis for input to improve on the product.
I suggested most of those numerous times before (also had some tickets which were relatively similar to your suggestions), but it seems that the suggestions are being largely ignored. I am not sure why, I can only guess that improving the export will be relatively difficult in comparison to making the frontend look more polished.
But then again, as said before, such a plugin first and foremost must be made for us shop owners who use the plugin on a daily basis to export customer designs in order to print them - we are the customer of the software developer ;) The frontend must certainly be good enough for an unskilled customer to be used without further support and it should feature all common functions that can be found in similar design tools but that's about it, the real magic is the backend including further automation, better export features and certainly a better documentation including best pracise guidlines on how to design the marks, how to set it up in order to optimise the output quality and usability.
Alex
I'm looking to purchase this product as well, but need this feature for it to be able to work for what I am doing, as numerous others here. Is this a feature that's included in the new beta release? If not any ETA on when this will be added?
Hi there,
Can we please get an update on this? are we just waiting on the new version which will have vector output?
james eltherinton
Better PDF creation would be a great addition to this plugin.
If it is to be taken seriously by the print industry, then the PDFs that are exported really need to have fonts embedded.
The whole point of an online designer is that it saves the Printer/Webstore owner time. If they have to recreate a product from scratch to send to print then its not really saving time.
Not a criticism, just my view as to where the plugin is lacking.
Overall a very, very good piece of software.
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