When i am running certain output creation tasks (or an all in one) I see “Flatten.exe” is running in addition to the weaver/merge engines. and sometimes continues to run even after the engines processing has slowed down.
What is this program doing? is it configurable in anyway?
Path to the program: C:\Program Files\Objectif Lune\OL Connect\plugins\com.objectiflune.weaver.engine_2020.1.0.20200511-0349-64396\runtime\bin64
As its name implies, Flatten.exe flattens some input files (in particular, PDF files with transparency or with partially opaque images) before the files can be used in certain output types (PS, PCL, AFP, etc.). The application is called on demand by the Output Creation process and may remain in memory for a while before it gets closed automatically (this prevents having to open/close it repeatedly during batch output).
It is not configurable: it is used solely by the Output Creation process.
Phil,
Thank you for your reply. After doing some further testing using the API cookbook files to run the AIO task outside of the workflow, it appears that it gets to 80-90% complete based on the status bar within about a minute and then sits there for an extended period of time (5+ minutes) with the flatten step running.
I am strictly using this AIO to turn a PDF generated by connect into Postscript. Because of the flattening this step is taking drastically longer than it is taking for connect to generate the PDF file in the first place.
Is there anything else I can do to speed this up?
Hi Sam,
There is not really anything you can do to speed this up. Flattening is a compute intensive process.
If you have control over the creation of the PDF, you can try to get rid of transparencies, and then no flattening will take place.
The reason flattening is unavoidable in certain cases, is that PostScript simply doesn’t support most types of transparency. So an innocent image with transparent background that is perfectly fine in PDF, can trigger this.