• Adding the separator semicolon – “;”. CSV from excel use such separators

Microsoft Excel barely follows any standards and for a Comma Separated Values file separates the values with semicolons. Strange, but they do it. So we have added support for such files when they are separated with “;”. Just upload the files as usual and generate the certificates.

• Removing the New Certificate Button

Certificates can now be created only from CSV documents. The New Certificate button used for single certificates is now deprecated and removed. It was barely used productively.

• If an owner is given more than once in the csv only one association is made with the user

If you give more then once the same email for a certificate than the certificate will be associated only once with the email. Not twice.

• Making the default scope My. This means that a users by default sees only his/her templates

By default the user now sees only his/her templates and not all the templates at Retiffy.com

• File name longer than 30 symbols does not throw error but is truncated

This was an internal error. The file names were not truncated appropriately.

• Fixing error on editing message template

Error was occurring and users could not edit the message template.

• Improving the work of the instances export

Easier select from the drop down menu on what should be exported

That is way we are proud to announce you can now upload and generate certificates from CSV documents written in different languages and more importantly in different Character Sets.

I prefer not to go into the details on how text is handled in computers and on the Internet. If you want to learn more about character sets and encoding you could follow this link – All About Unicode, UTF8 & Character Sets

Always save in Unicode (UTF-8)

If you want your documents to be processed correctly by most of the software programs on this world you should save them in a UTF-8 or Unicode. You can than import your CSV documents to Retiffy. Following is a screenshot of a dialog from Libreoffice when saving the document as text. You are given the chance to select the Character Set: In this case we select Unicode (UTF-8)

Saving text documents in Libre Office and selecting the character set

If you are using Excel you can choose the Encoding from Save->Tools->Web Options->Encoding Tab as show on the pictures below

Choosing Encoding in Microsoft Excel.

There should also be an option in any other software that you are using. Specifying the encoding to UTF-8 gives you the greatest chance to open this document correctly with a software different from the one that created it.

I don`t know what “character set is” and which “character set” am I using

If by any chance you prefer, or you are unaware that you use a encoding different from UTF-8, then Retiffy will report this. Take for example a CSV document containing Cyrillic letters in Windows-1251 character set. This is how they would look like when uploaded to Retiffy.

As you can see on this screenshot Retiffy tries to read the file as UTF-8, but since it is created on a Windows machine and encoded in Windows-1251 you see this strange characters. If you select the correct encoding Retiffy will automatically show you how the characters are interpreted and if it could understand them, as on the screenshot below:

Why can`t Retiffy guess the character set?

Text files do not contain information about the character set in which characters are encoded. We were trying for the last few months to guess the encoding. And although it was 96% successful there were cases in which the character sets could not be guessed. That’s way we left it to the user to select it from a drop down list. I am sure that now we would have 100% success rate.

What character sets are supported?

We are currently supporting

“UTF-8″, ”ISO 8859-1″, “ISO-8859-2″, “ISO-8859-7″, “ISO-8859-9″, “ISO-8859-15″, “Windows-1251″, “Windows-1252″, “Windows-1253″, “Windows-1254″, “Windows-1256″, “Windows-874″, “Windows-1254″, “Windows-1250″, “KOI8-R”, “Shift JIS”, “EUC-JP”, “EUC-KR”, “GBK”, “GB2312″, “Big5″, “US-ASCII”, “TIS-620″.

If your documents are using a different character set, feel free to write to us. We will implement it as quickly as possible.

Till now it was possible to download each certificate separately, but this is a very tedious process especially if you have hundreds or even thousands of certificates in a campaign. That is why you can now download certificates from a Campaign in a PDF or CSV file.

PDF is suitable for viewing and printing while CSV is suitable to editing and then mass updating certificates.

Just go to Campaigns->Select the campaign you want to download

Then press Download->Choose the type, for now this could be eighter a CSV of PDF

Finally you would receive an email with link for downloading the certificates. This link is available for about a day.

The feature

With the latest version of Retiffy, when you are creating certificates from a CSV document or spreadsheet, if there are any errors on certain rows, this errors will be reported to you.

Lets say that you have forgotten to set a template . There is no way for Retiffy to know which certificate template to use for the new certificate. So we are reporting this error and we are creating certificates for the other rows.

Example for a mistaken row in a CSV could be seen below:

And this is the result you would get from Retiffy:

As you could see from the picture there were 0 certificates created and 1 error occurred. There is also a description of the error and on which row was this error found.

We hope this new feature will make it easier for you and us to quickly create our new certificates.

This are the four ranks we have come up with.

With the latest version of Retiffy you could include only one of the ranks on the certificate, by uploading a CSV containing a column ‘rank’ with value 5,6,7,8. You could use this feature for marks, ranks, personal pictures and others. You could also choose your own styles of rank for your own certificates.

To implement it in your certificates you need two things:

• Create a group of objects in the SVG

• Add a title on the group in the form of #{unique:name:id} (as shown on the picture) where:

1. “unique” is special word,
2. “name” is the value of the column when creating certificates
3. “id” is the value of the column “name” for the given certificate

• Upload a CSV spreadsheet containing a column “name” with values for each certificate the corresponding “id”

Here is an example of how one of our certificates look like

So here it is – 4 pages in PDF format that have most of the information about Retiffy.

You could see the advantages, description on who should use Retiffy, what is the structure of the certificates and how to reach us.

First – they do not have the time or resources to prepare and send all the certificates.
Second – they are not in business anymore.

Retiffy helps to solve both reasons.

It takes all the hassle from you in managing the certificates. Everything is easy, managed automatically and requires a minimal work from you as we wrote in earlier blog post.
The longer you provide a great experience and build more credibility with electronic certificates, the longer you will be in business.

This is where electronic verifiable certificates from Retiffy step in. They could be downloaded and printed, but they could also be shared and tracked.

A few years ago we personally tried giving paper certificates to out students. Printed on a white paper and put into a plastic they looked really beautiful. Here is one of them:

Paper in this case meant “invisible to more then a few people”

What we noticed is that after students receive them only their parent and probably siblings see the certificates. This, we thought, was definitely not fair for the efforts  the student has put. So we start issuing paper and electronic certificates to our students. And even today we issue electronic certificates, we print them, hand them out to the students and after that send them on their email.

We are doing them ones a week. Official language is English. We are using Google Events and Hangouts (Google account is required). Link for joining will be posted on the calendar event 20 minutes before start.

Please register with this Form so that we could send you a reminder and invite you to the demonstrations.

Asia and Australia - Every Wednesday 13:30 (GMT+8)
Europe and Africa – Every Wednesday 13:30 Central European Time (GMT+1)
North and South America – Every Wednesday 13:30 Central Time Zone (GMT-6)