create a print catalog

[kitcorsa]

right here is a question.

with the google base mod etc you crate a file which you upload to google base. you can view this file in the mod and gives a nice display of the products.

is there a way i could get this feed and it show a small image as well??

what im trying to do is create a printed based catalog. ive coped and pased the text from the googlebase feed into word then into quark express perfectly, but it would be really great if i could get the image as well at the same time. save me hours of work.

can this be done??

also can this put put be done via catogary, this would save me another couple of days work as well.

any support will great full

[schoolboy]

I'm in the process of trying out PDF creators. The idea is to turn a HTML page into a PDF (which then has the advantage of being printable, as well as digital.

Take a look at:- https://www.pdfonline.com/convert_pdf.asp#

[Marg]

Maybe hoping to also share it, schoolboy??
I would LOVE this.
Marg

[schoolboy]

The great challenge of course, is getting your PDF catalogue to look professional, and not just a "rendition" of a web page. There is no "single click" solution to this.

Over the years, I have investigated many options, and the reality is that your printed catalogue is best-produced OUTSIDE your website environment.

However, with a little intuitive thinking, the task is not as onerous as one would expect, though the true-blue professional solution can be expensive (software wise).

For example...

There is a "bolt-on" piece of software for Quark Xpress that has an interesting feature. Basically, when you create your Quark pages, you can configure "insertion points" for data drawn off a database (in much the same way as a mail-merge function works - eg: MS Excel to MSWord) - so basically, you can create a Quark page much like a template, that calls its dynamic data off a EXCEL spreadsheet.

Because it is possible to export your zenshop database (as a CSV, or Excel) through something like phpMyAdmin, you thus have the raw data that can be parsed to the Quark templates "on-the-fly". In this way, all you need to do is maintain your zenshop database as your PRINCIPAL database, then whenever you need to create an updated PDF, you just get a current export of your dbase and parse that through Quark.

I can't remember what this bolt-on is called as it's a couple of years since I looked at it, but I know that it costs about £800.

[tonycl16]

Hi there.. didn't know if you knew but there is a printable price list mod in other modules in the downloads sextion...I have used it and it's cool....comes up in it's own page and you can then print it or use it to navigate.

[schoolboy]

Having said the above, one could simply use MSWord and Excel (though I always cringe when I recommend microsoft products ).

If you want to turn HTML to PDF, then there's another useful bit of software I use to generate STATIC html pages off my zenshop database. This is called 4W WebMerge.

I use it largely for SEO purposes - when I build a webshop, I build a separate, STATIC, stand-alone site on a different server.

4W WebMerge is simply brilliant at creating static webpages out of long databases. You create a html template, then parse your zenshop dbase** through it, and in a couple of seconds, you have separate STATIC html pages for every product in your store. Searh engines LOVE these, and I build them according to SEO "rules".

**(with a few modifications).

Now, you can (using the BCF EasyPDF Print Driver - see my first post) turn these html pages into PDFs - also in a matter of seconds.

To see how 4W WebMerge has helped me, compare these two websites:-

www.buysouthafrican.co.uk
www.sa-shop.co.uk

These sites are a couple of weeks old, and already I'm dominating some search phrases for key product names. One has to be careful of blatant duplication as search engines can penalise you for this.

I am now looking at building a 4W WebMerge template to help me create individual PDF's of the resultant html pages.

[kitcorsa]

i looked at the quarks was as you said schoolboy and drawn the information from the easy populate csv file, works fine, appart from no image and the database only saves the file name of the image and then links according.

if i click the all products in the online nav bar this gives something what i would like but id like it on a sheet like to froogle feeder but with the image shown.

then its a simple copy and paste

[schoolboy]

Hi there.. didn't know if you knew but there is a printable price list mod in other modules in the downloads sextion...I have used it and it's cool....comes up in it's own page and you can then print it or use it to navigate.

Thanks Tony... yes, we are aware of this and I have used it in the past, but here we are talking about producing a more professional-looking "catalogue" as a PDF and are trying to find other, more complex ways of using core data in the zencart database to "populate" a template that can then be turned into a PDF.

[spbennett]

Maybe a_berezin's RSS Feed add-on might be useful if you just want to include the images on a page that looks similar to the Google Base contribution.

[kitcorsa]

will have a look at that