Variant types are predefined transformations of a binary objects such as images, audios, videos etc.

A transformation (or more than one) includes changes to be applied to the original binary data to generate the desired variant (e.g. 'scale to 500 pixel of width', 'convert in flv format' etc.)

Variant types are to be configured in an early phase of the system installation, or any time later.

Which and how many variant types you may need?

The variants are used in many fields, namely:

•Image variants for Web pages, to suit the image "holes", required by the Web site layout. For example, let us assume that your Web site requires three "holes": a big horizontal one, a medium vertical one and a small square one. Therefore, you need to know the exact hole size in pixels, and then to create three images variants of the "crop" type.

•Audio resampling, to make the audio files smaller and faster to stream or download.

•Video converting/resampling, to create Flash variants for any video format, or to reduce the video size.

•PDF variants.

Therefore, the number of different variant types depend on the publishing needs.

See also

Review variant types

Create a variant type

And also

Multiple convert steps support for parsers

Converting EPS into PDF

Modifying only image metadata

Thumbnail and preview format in parsing