Doxpop - Tools for Attorneys and Public Information Researchers: The Plat Thickens

Monday, August 10, 2015

The Plat Thickens

Today, (8/10/15) Doxpop is releasing a update to our software that turns plats and other oversized documents into PDF files for viewing and download. This new version addresses some scaling issues that users recently reported when viewing larger documents.

From now on, all large document images will be rendered as PDF files in their original size.

The good news is that this means you'll get the highest resolution available, with no more weird margins.

On the more challenging side, it means that when you print one of  these documents, you'll have to either scale the image down to fit the paper in your printer (usually with a "fit to page" checkbox) or it will print "tiles" that you'll then have to tape together for a full-sized image.

You'll need to play with the print settings in your PDF viewer to get this just right, but since you are a Doxpop user, we know you're smart enough to figure it out.

We are also happy to help you with this over the phone, because even smart people have bad days. Call 866-369-7671 during working hours for help.



Note to Firefox users:

While testing this enhancement, we noticed that although the default PDF viewers for Internet Explorer and Chrome work fine with their default settings for large documents,  the default Firefox viewer makes a mess of them.

If you are having problems viewing or printing large documents in Firefox, here's how to solve the problem:

  1. Make sure you have the most current version of Adobe Reader installed. You can download it here at no cost: https://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/.
  2. Open Firefox. Click the menu button New Fx Menu and then choose Preferences (this may be called Options in older versions).
  3. Select Portable Document Format (PDF) in the left side of the list by clicking on it.
  4. Click on the drop-down arrow in the Action column for the above entry and select Adobe Reader.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

In Hamilton County we have a lot of plats and surveys that come out tiny. Some times they even look OK on the screen but print out tiny.

Nick Fankhauser said...

Hi Brian- Thanks for your feedback on this. What you describe is exactly the problem we are correcting with this change. Have you experienced this problem with any plats retrieved after August 10th?

BTW, if you purchased plats images that were unusable prior to 8/10, let us know and we'll make it right with you by either providing a usable image or refunding the fee.

-Nick