Advanced Features

Image Normalisation

We added Image Normalisation because we found we had many customers with files over 200MB who were dragging and dropping 10MB digital pictures pictures directly inside Styled Text areas, and then scaling it to 5% or 10% of its original size. Users did not realise that RapidWeaver was saving the entire original image in the RapidWeaver save file.

Image Normalisation is highly recommended for very large (100MB+) RapidWeaver documents, otherwise the performance and stability of your system may be degraded.

Image Normalisation works by taking images that you have scaled down to smaller sizes yourself and stores that smaller image in the RapidWeaver document file that’s saved to disk. So, if you have a 3000x3000 image and scale that to 10% of its original size via the Media Inspector, the resulting file that’s saved in the site file is 300x300. This does not result in any loss in quality of the published image, although it does result in you not being able back to ‘upscale’ the image to its original size (thus the large warning when you run it).

Image Normalisation is an irreversible operation. It does not affect the final look and feel of your web site, but if you have very large images that you have rescaled to, for example, 10% of their original size, you will not be able to upscale those images to be larger after Normalisation. Normalisation will affect all images that have been copied into your project, so make sure that you have backed-up the originals elsewhere if you intend to use them at a latter date.

Figure 1: Image Normalisation

Sandwich Archiving

RapidWeaver archives any site files you open in the application. The archive is kept in the following location:

~/Library/Caches/com.realmacsoftware.rapidweaverpro/

RapidWeaver manages files it copies to this location, and by default the contents of the folder can be no larger than 500MB, however will keep no less than two files [that may total more than 500MB - so if you open two 300MB files, RapidWeaver will erase the archive folder’s contents, and place the two 300MB files in there].

If you wish to increase the maximum size of the folder’s contents, you can simply enter the following command into the Terminal (Changing the value of 600 sets the folder size).

defaults write com.realmacsoftware.rapidweaverpro SandwichArchiving- KeepSize -int 600

If you wish to increase the minimum number of files the folder may contain, you can simply enter the following command into the Terminal (Changing the value of 5 sets the minimum number of files, even if the total filesize is greater than the size specified above).

defaults write com.realmacsoftware.rapidweaverpro SandwichArchiving- MinimumNumberOfFiles -int 5