Printing and Publishing
In association with Infoprint Solutions Company
Making the move to variable data digital printing PDF Print E-mail
Written by Chris Reid, Commercial Print Solutions Manager, IBM Printing Systems   
As a traditional offset printer, the prospect of supporting digital printing technology for your customers can be a daunting task Many print shops lack the IT skills or infrastructure to handle digital output. They may not be familiar with typical variable data formats or the composition tools used to build variable applications. Still others haven’t made the leap to digital print technology in order to support a fully variable page for colour or black-and-white printing.

You may be at a crossroads where you need to make a decision about investing in digital print technology.

Or perhaps you require variable data printing (VDP) in order to expand your offerings to grow your business and satisfy the increased demands of your current customers. Regardless of your situation, any business decision requires sound numbers to make a decision about a pending investment. The first step is to quantify the need by answering questions like:
  • Do you have enough digital print business in the pipeline to justify the costs?
  • Are there enough long-term contracts to support the investment?
  • Are you going to invest in the hardware, software and other considerations based on one or two short-term contracts or new leads?
  • Can you absorb the risk if you lose these deals?
  • Can you move short-run offset work to your digital device to defray the cost?
  • Where else can you acquire digital pages?
  • Can your current staff support a completely digital workflow?
  • Do you have the IT infrastructure required to support digital print – servers, network bandwidth and applications?
Finally, you should think about how much variable data printing you’re doing now and what volumes you will see over the next year, two years and five years out. Reviewing this information ahead of time will help you choose the correct device and make decisions down the road.

Digital pages can come from transaction-based documents like billing statements and direct mail but also from books – either educational or short-run – to complement existing offerings such as large offset runs. This allows you to provide a mixed offering to your customers so they can lower inventory costs and time to market. These require different skill sets to execute as well as to sell to your customers who are often focused on unit cost. Digital technology can provide new revenue opportunities for you and new opportunities for your customers.

Once they’ve made the decision to implement digital technology, many print providers start small with a digital cut-sheet device that also operates as a copier to help defray the costs of moving to digital. There are devices on the market that offer walkup copy, scan, email and digital print capabilities for cut-sheet applications. They deliver all this at an affordable price with built-in scalability thanks to support from Adobe® PostScript®, Portable Document Format (PDF), Printer Control Language (PCL) and IBM Advanced Function Presentation™ (AFP™).

When your digital print volume reaches several million impressions per month, it’s time to look at continuous forms devices. These printers run at up to 1,220 impressions per minute1 and 600dpi. They are also capable of printing MICR, the magnetic characters used on checks, efficiently at the same high resolution. Reaching these kinds of volumes requires a more sophisticated application that is very efficient at building and managing the print stream in – especially with complex variable data applications.

Software tools like Objectif Lune’s PrintShop Mail or QuarkXPress® plug-ins allow you to build somewhat complex variable data applications using familiar tools such as PDFs or Quark for page layout. PrintShop Mail also gives you the ability to cache static information to be placed on the page at the printer to present smaller file sizes and run much more efficiently. Other tools like PlanetPress® allow you to build more complex applications and output even more efficient datastreams as well. While these applications are typically used for cutsheet black-and-white and colour digital printers, they can also feed pages to high-volume continuous forms printers to provide some scalability.

Easy-to-use applications such as PrintSoft PReS, GMC PrintNet™ and Elixir DesignPro™ allow you to compose applications through a simple graphical user interface (GUI) or through scripts. These applications require more skills and a better understanding of data formats – either from host systems or large databases – but these tools are capable of producing PostScript or PDF and many other datastreams as well as AFP. Other tools for building complex VDP applications and outputting AFP include offerings from Document Sciences, Group1, Exstream and ISIS Papyrus.

AFP is one of the predominant architectures used in producing transaction documents such as financial statements and utility bills. Worldwide, billions of variable data pages are printed every year using AFP. Most likely the phone and utility bills you receive at home or view online are created using this architecture. AFP was developed by IBM over 20 years ago and is the de facto standard for variable data printing. Vendors such as Oce, Xerox, IBM and others supply hardware and print software that take advantage of its capabilities. It is an object-oriented language that allows the print server and the printer to manage static and variable data extremely efficiently and accurately. When using AFP the print server that drives the printer converts the AFP data and resources (images and logos) to Intelligent Printer Data Stream™ (IPDS™). This creates a detailed communication link between the print server and the printer and allows the print server to understand where each page is at any given moment on the printer. This ‘handshaking’ is critical for transaction printing.

AFP can give you the confidence that each page of your customers’ applications can be printed correctly. That’s why it is used so often in transaction printing – because it can help ensure that any single customer’s statement prints correctly. For example, if a continuous forms or cut-sheet printer jams, the AFP architecture supports full error recovery and notification. The printer can automatically recover to the last good page and manage the integrity of the output from print head to stack – whether cut-sheet or continuous forms.

Customers printing non-transaction output can also take advantage of AFP when printing short-run books or any other output, because the underlying architecture is the same. While missing or duplicate pages may not be as critical in a book as with a bank statement, it’s a competitive advantage that you can offer your customers.

IBM is currently expanding the AFP architecture by helping to move it to an even more open standard. Participants from across the industry have joined the AFP Color Consortium to redefine AFP for colour printing. IBM is doing this to further support colour printing efficiency and to ensure that a colour printed on one device accurately matches the colour printed on a different device. When the application is printed on a black-and-white printer, the colours can be accurately converted to greyscale.

We believe that this is critical to the variable printing industry to bring the same kind of reliability and security to colour printing that black-and-white digital printers have enjoyed for over two decades.

Once you have determined the kind of applications and print hardware that will meet your needs, be sure to select vendors that support a variety of datastreams. You don’t want to lock yourself into any proprietary tools. But you do want to be sure that the applications you build to print on one device are easily transportable to other devices in the industry. This gives you the flexibility of choosing the best-suited hardware and software for your environment at the most attractive prices – another advantage of AFP.

IBM, Advanced Function Presentation, AFP, Infoprint, Intelligent Printer Data Stream and IPDS are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM Corporation in the US, other  countries or both.
 
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the US, other countries, or both. 

Adobe, the Adobe logo, PostScript, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, Acrobat and Version Cue are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the US and/or other countries. 

Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. 

Reference

1. Exact speed varies depending on document complexity,
 system configuration, software application, driver and printer state
 
< Prev   Next >
[ Back ]