Reply To: Xmetal is not rendering images

[Derek Read]

Check the following:

1. Are the paths in the references to your images correct?
 Have you moved any images, or any XML files, or renamed any folders or made changes to any catalog files?
 If a CMS is being used have any settings been changed on the server?

2. Does the CTM file associated with your schema (DTD or XSD) include the proper settings that tell XMetaL Author to render a particular element as an image? You may have modified the CTM file directly, it may have been deleted, overwritten, moved, or become corrupted, or if this is a new installation perhaps you did not know the CTM file does this and to include it (if someone else originally created the customization for this schema).

3. Have you started referencing images of a new file type that might not be supported in this old release (or any release)? If so, you might need to do some additional work to support them (see #4 below).

4. If the file type being referenced as an image is not supported natively (native support includes BMP, GIF, PNG, JPG, WMF, EMF, TIF, PCX, TGA, ICO) then some files in addition to the CTM settings can be required. In newer releases this is configurable, but with this old release script code must be written. This would include at minimum an MCR file with “OnInitialize” and possibly “OnShouldCreate” macros and if there is no default capability built into your version of Windows you may also need to install additional software or an ActiveX control to do the actual rendering. For 4.6 that would include the following file types and an associated ActiveX control capable of rendering them (these are known to be configured by our clients): SVG, CGM, HTML, MS Excel, PDF, and various video file types. Similar to #2, these files might be missing, corrupt, etc.

5. Version 4.6 is from 2005/6 and was tested on Windows 2000 and XP only. Perhaps you have upgraded Windows and run into one of many issues we identified and corrected to make our software compatible with the significant changes Microsoft introduced with Windows Vista and Windows 7 and more minor issues introduced with Windows 8, 8.1 and 10. That work was started with version 5.5 and mostly completed by version 6.0 SP1 (for Vista / 7). Many other improvements have been made since then. The current release is XMetaL Author Enterprise 11 and is the first release to support Windows 10.

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