Prevent downloading of images when opening

[Katriel Reichman]

I would like to prevent XMetaL from downloading images specified in the DITA topic when I open the file.  (The images are stored in a web-based CMS and image-rich topics can take a long time to open.)

Setting Tools > Options > View > to unselect "Show inline images" results in the inline images not being displayed, but they are still downloaded.

I am using XMetaL 5.1.1 with Astoria On Demand CMS ver. 5.3.  Any ideas welcome!

[Su-Laine Yeo]

I've asked our developers about this issue, and there is no feature in XMetaL to turn off downloading images from a CMS. We've received this feature request before, and I've logged your request for it so that it can be prioritized appropriately for a future release.

One hack that will prevent an image from downloading is to set permissions on the image file in the CMS so that you may not view the file. Obviously there are a lot of disadvantages to doing this, but it may be worthwhile in some cases.

[ghkrause]

Katriel,
Just a thought to drop in: depending on the file format of your images you may be able to have low resolution versions used while editing and previewing and high resolution version at rendition of final output. This may or may not speed up the time for download of all images. The fastest download may come with a GIF or SVG file containing just some text "Placeholder for image XYZ".

Of course, I expected the deselection of "Show inline images" to result in no download of images as you do. Good to read that XMetaL logged the request for now.