Images Slowing You Down? Speed Up ePublisher Conversions with This Simple Trick

When working with documentation projects that contain numerous images, you've likely experienced the frustration of waiting for ePublisher to process all those graphics during every conversion cycle. This wait time can significantly impact your productivity, especially when you're making frequent changes and need to check the results quickly. Fortunately, ePublisher 2024.1 introduces a simple yet powerful way to speed up your development workflow.

The Challenge: Images and Conversion Time

Image processing is often one of the most time-consuming aspects of generating documentation output. For each conversion, ePublisher needs to:

• Process each image from your source documents
• Copy files to the output directory
• Apply any necessary transformations
• Embed them properly in the output format

While this comprehensive image handling is essential for your final published documentation, it's often unnecessary during the development and testing phases. If you're working on formatting, checking text content, or adjusting styles, you may not need to see the images in every test conversion.

The Solution: Leveraging [Prototype] Style Inheritance

The ePublisher 2024.1 release includes significant improvements to style inheritance, and we can leverage this enhancement to dramatically speed up conversion times. The key insight is that the [Prototype] style effectively propagates any Style Rules or Style Options to all child styles.

This means we can use a simple setting change to disable image generation across your entire project with a single click:

1. In ePublisher Designer, navigate to the Style Designer
2. Select the Graphic Style called [Prototype]
3. Set the "Generate output" option to disabled

With this one change, ePublisher will skip the entire image generation process during conversions, resulting in significantly faster processing times—especially for image-heavy documentation.

Implementation Details

Here's a step-by-step guide to implementing this time-saving technique:

1. Open your project in ePublisher Designer
2. Click on Project > Active Target and select the target you want to modify (like "Reverb 2.0" or "PDF - XSL-FO")
3. Click on View > Style Designer to open the Style Designer panel
4. In the left pane, expand the Graphic Styles category
5. Select the [Prototype] style at the top of the list
6. In the right pane under Options, find the "Generate output" property
7. Change the setting from "Enabled" to "Disabled"

You'll notice that the "Generate output" property name and value now appear in bold text in the Style Designer, indicating that you've modified it from the default setting.

Now when you run a conversion, you'll notice a dramatic reduction in processing time, allowing you to iterate more quickly during development.

Remember: Re-enable for Production

This technique is intended as a development workflow enhancement, not a production setting. When you're ready to generate your final output for distribution, be sure to re-enable image generation:

1. Return to the Style Designer
2. Select the [Prototype] Graphic style
3. Change the "Generate output" property back to "Enabled"

This ensures your final documentation includes all necessary images while still allowing you to benefit from faster conversions during development.

Advanced Implementation: Target-Specific Settings

For more sophisticated workflows, you might want to create a dedicated development target that keeps images disabled while maintaining normal image generation in your production targets.

To set up a development-specific target:

1. Click Project > Manage Targets... to open the target management dialog
2. Add a new Target of the same Format type as your production Target
   • Note: If you've set Style properties at the Format level, your new target should inherit the same look and feel
3. In the Style Designer, make sure you're viewing this new target
4. Disable image generation for the [Prototype] Graphic style as described above

Now you can easily switch between your development target (fast, no images) and your production target (complete with images) depending on your current needs.

Important note: When setting up target-specific overrides, make sure you set "Generate output" in the Target Options rather than Format Options. This ensures the change applies only to the specific target you're working with, not to all targets using the same format.

Compatible with All Output Formats

This technique works across all ePublisher output formats, including Webworks Reverb 2.0, PDF XSL-FO, and more. The time savings will vary based on your hardware performance and the number and size of images in your project, but projects with hundreds of images can see dramatic improvements in conversion speed.

Conclusion

By taking advantage of the improved style inheritance in ePublisher 2024.1, you can significantly streamline your documentation development workflow. This simple trick—disabling image generation via the [Prototype] Graphic style—can save you valuable time during the iterative development process while still ensuring your final output includes all necessary visual elements.

Give it a try in your next work session, and you might be surprised at just how much faster your conversions can be when you're not waiting for image processing. Your productivity will thank you!