Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Explain this Characters Per Line stuff for V-Print CR

A page is 8.5 inches wide. To make the numbers easy, if the font that you use, can fit ten characters per inch; you have 85 columns on one line.

Now we have to subtract margins, borders, and gutters from the 8.5 inches/85 columns. With left and right margins set to 1.5 inches each, you are down to 55 columns. Subtract borders and gutters and you are left with about 51 columns. As long as no line of text has more than this number of characters (including line numbers, timestamps and various spaces), there will be no wrapping of lines.

So the question is, how can I get more than about 50 characters per line.

First is number of characters per inch. This is determined by four factors.

1. First and most obvious is the font size. The larger the font size, the fewer characters per inch.
2. Next is a proportional font as compared to a non-proportional font. You can fit more characters per inch using a proportional font.
3. Not as obvious is font family. Some font families are simply larger than others. For instance, Garamond fits about 25% more characters per inch than Verdana.
4. Finally, bolded or not. Bolded text takes more space, yielding fewer characters per inch.

Second is size of your margins, simply reducing from 1.5 on each side to 1 inch per side adds ten characters per line.

Next would be borders. Not having borders allows that space to be used for text.

Finally, would be what goes on a line. Obviously, adding in timestamps decreases the amount of text that can be on the line.

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Friday, February 4, 2011

The Great Dallas Blizzard of '11

WOW!
The "Worst Storm of the Century" really hit Dallas hard.

This is the view from our front door.  Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, we had to deal with icy roads.  Then Thursday night/Friday morning, we covered the icy roads with four inches of snow.

While school kids are enjoying not being in school, it has been too cold for most of them to be outside enjoying the snow day.


Meanwhile the adults have been between a rock and a hard place with having to decide to work and buy groceries or remain off the roads.

For those of us from the frozen northland (I'm from so far north, I still occasionally say "eh"), it truly has been old home week.

I do understand that it has been playing havoc with the Super Bowl expectations.  The visitors just aren't too excited about leaving their hotels to frequent the DFW offerings.

I hope everyone has a pleasant weekend and may your favorite team win the Super Bowl.  Or if they aren't playing, may your temporary favorite team win.

chuck

Visionary Legal Technologies
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Thursday, February 3, 2011

V-Print CR Deliverable Files Information

When you choose the Delivery menu option, V-Print generates the files that you need. It also allows you to automatically e-mail and/or print the appropriate ones.

But it’s main purpose is to generate the necessary files. With that in mind, you would only use the Delivery option once per depo. In fact, you can choose to never use the automatic e-mail generation and printing from the Delivery window and be just fine.

Once you have used the Delivery option to generate all the files needed, you can close V-Print and complete all your printing, e-mailing, uploading, burning to cd/dvd, etc. without using V-Print.

You can generate an e-mail from your e-mail program and attach just the files needed by one client and create another e-mail and attach only the files needed by another client. You can open the full page .pdf file and print as many copies as needed. You can open the condensed .pdf file and print it once with the word index and once without the word index for different clients.

Once you have used the Delivery option, unless the depo is changed; there is never a reason to re-generate the files.

Does that explanation kind of give you a better overview of the Delivery process as implemented in V-Print?

The files that most of your clients are going to want, would be:
• The full page .pdf file, with the word index; for easy reading.
• The condensed .pdf file; for easy storage.
• The .vdf file for use in the Viewer program.
• The .txt file for use in trial presentation software and copy/paste into documents.
• If you have exhibits, the .vig file for use in the Viewer program or a trial presentation program.
• If you have exhibits, the .pdf files of the exhibits for easy storage or use in a trial presentation program.
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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

To print out the deposition with the designations highlighted, you must set up and use the Fact DB.

Here is the process:
  1. Open your case, obviously.
  2. Choose the Facts tab on the Shortcut bar.
  3. Click the “Display Designations/Events/Issues/People table” icon next to the “X” for Delete.
  4. Select the Designations tab on the Fact window.
  5. Select one of the existing Descriptions and click the corresponding entry in the Font column.
  6. Choose how to visually discriminate these entries by selecting a Font, a Color and a Style.
    1. While a Color may be all that is needed, if you print on a B&W printer, your choice of Style will allow your printout to be useful.
  7. If you make any changes, so that you get a pencil icon, click on any other entry to write that record to the database.
  8. Now select the appropriate Q&A pair(s) for a designation.
  9. Right click on the selected text and choose, Fact Database, Added Selected Text.
  10. Accept the default description.
  11. On the Fact itself, select the Designations tab, then choose the appropriate entry; such as, Defense Direct, etc.
    1. Continue until all the designations that you are interested in, have been entered.
  12. Choose File, Print Transcript.
  13. Choose your printer.
  14. Choose the appropriate transcript.
  15. Set the Print Style to Mini 4 page Transcript.
  16. Choose all pages or only some.
  17. Check the box for Annotate Designations.
  18. Click the Print Preview to ensure you have chosen correctly.
  19. Print.


Thank you,
Chuck
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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Special Character usage in Visionary

Hex codes are base 16 vice our daily base 10 decimal system. These characters or hex digits are, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F. They are listed like this to make it obvious they are not decimal numbers, “x00” for zero decimal, through “xFF” for 255 decimal. Basic ASCII text usage is the first 128 characters; hex 00 through 7F. The first 32 hex codes are of interest only to us geeks, and are called the non-printable characters. From hex 20 (x20) or decimal 32, through x7F or decimal 127; are all the valid ASCII characters. This consists of the digits, the upper case letters, the lower case letters and about 34 special characters (such as the period, comma, plus sign, etc.)

Since this stops halfway to xFF, there are many other possible two character hex codes. Everything from x80 through FF. It has become a non-standard “standard” practice to map these to other characters. This mapping depends on what character set you are using. For instance, there is a mapping for the Cyrillic alphabet, the Greek alphabet, etc. Each of these character mappings use the hex codes greater than x7F. Word processing programs and other text generation programs can use a default character mapping and add in 128 more characters. But they are not ASCII text files and rely on the use of the appropriate character mapping.


All Visionary software is designed to use the ASCII character set.