Working with Collections

From ResourceSpace Documentation Wiki

Work in progress (to copy from Getting Started PDF).

E-mail collections to external users

It is possible to e-mail resources to recipients without a log-in account by entering the recipients e-mail adress into the "E-mail to users..." field.

The key given out is actually against resources, not collections, so if you e-mail a collection then add resources you will need to e-mail the collection again if any new resources have been added. This is for security reasons, i.e. so an external user isn't suddenly being granted access to new resources, even though they haven't been e-mailed them.

PDF Contact Sheet

In Manage My Collections, you can make a contact sheet of any collection by clicking "Contact Sheet". This will bring you to a configuration page where you can choose page size, number of columns, and orientation. When you click "Preview", a thumbnail will be made showing you the layout that your selected configuration will produce. When you click "Create" it will allow you to download the PDF contact sheet. Clicking on any image in the PDF will bring you back to the resource on the website. (requires login)

For Admins: Unicode Support

As of svn r1259 the contact sheet script was migrated to TCPDF, which improves unicode support for those installations which use languages with unique characters. By default, contact sheet pdf files are very small because the font is only specified as Helvetica, not embedded. If you are having problems with special characters that show up as ??? or boxes, you may wish to try embedding a font which has the characters you need:

$ttf_file="dejavusans.ttf";

The file needs to be added to the lib/tcpdf/fonts directory, and the fonts directory needs to be writeable. The first time the font is used, TCPDF will make a version of the font that it can use.

If you have fontforge on the server, you can also experiment with subsetting that font, which will greatly reduce the pdf filesize.

$subsetting=true;
$fontforge_path="/usr/bin";

See Subsetting Project for more about the method.