Opening the menu files after the download
A private migration trial produced downloaded menu images with changed lettering and a missing photo. We checked a separate export route before considering any change to our weekly process.
On 20 October, I had agreed to a private trial of moving our existing menu designs into a new design workspace. We used a menu that had already been prepared, so the agent could compare the exported files with work we had checked before. Our usual weekly process was still in place.
The agent downloaded the workspace’s PNG exports and opened the actual files. They were the expected size, but some of the lettering had changed. On the sixth design, the space for a food photograph was blank. The export had also shown a warning that an image could not be included. A file had arrived, with part of the menu missing.
Those PNGs were not accepted for the television package. The missing photograph and changed type were inside the exported pictures, so converting them into JPGs would have carried the same problems forward. The useful comparison was between the pictures themselves: whether the food, words and layout had survived the export.
There was another route to test. The project had its own JPG exporter, which worked from the menu’s source files, fonts and photographs. The agent took a fixed copy of the saved source and ran that exporter. Keeping the source version fixed meant the resulting files could be tied back to the version being checked.
This run produced a ZIP containing seven JPGs at 1920 by 1080 pixels. The agent checked that each image could be opened and compared the files in the ZIP with the separately saved outputs. Their file hashes also matched the earlier accepted run of the same source exporter. That gave us evidence for these actual files, beyond a message saying the download had been requested.
The trial still ended with the usual weekly process unchanged. The hosted design canvas had become unreliable to load, and a future real menu still needed a complete check before we switched over. We had verified a way to reproduce this menu’s JPG files and recorded why the native exports from this trial were unsuitable. The move to a new everyday workflow remained unfinished.
