Electronic printing systems of various kinds are now actually in common use, allowing personalised or variable data making (VDP) so that not merely is the text and image content of each item designed to the average person recipient, also how many pages can be varied to suit.

Today's advanced multi-channel advertising automation methods certainly are a far cry from the simple send mix of the 1990s and early in the day, or even the cross printing of ten years approximately ago, when brochures or mailers pre-printed on offset squeezes could have personalised text overprinted using a electronic printing head.

Today, every thing is printed afresh on each page. While that is no issue for toner or inkjet presses, it does potentially position a massive burden on the digital front conclusion (DFE) and the RIP that's to operate a vehicle the press. With the graphical complexity of customised pieces significantly restricted just by the designer's imagination, the control period in printing VDP jobs can quickly become a significant productivity bottleneck.

Instead of imaging a page once for the electronic push and then making it several hundred or thousand times, there has to be an imaging process for every site, which will be then printed once. Half-an-hour's delay before making several hundred copies over several hours could be acceptable, but a good minute's delay between every replicate will be a output disaster.

Ultimately, the push must be driven at its whole ranked pace within a VDP printing run, which typically provides RIP only fractions of a second to prepare each new page. Bad design/file construction practices may really hinder this. Poor techniques contain unnecessary adding of things and haphazard utilization of transparency results, using images which are at larger resolution than is needed for printing, or providing vector artwork with unnecessarily many control details, for example.

To help expand complicate matters, there is no one way to create VDP jobs. There's a number of publishing tools, ranging from simple plug-ins for popular visual design pc software through to devoted cross-media generation suites that make variable information printing, email and other on line assets from exactly the same core material. With a lot of them it's equally possible to create VDP files which are good or bad from the printability perception; they could - eventually - produce exactly the same printing but may be greater or quite definitely worse in terms of whole handling time and therefore work turnaround.

VDP'emitters'like and also this use a selection of VDP'languages'to hand off the print work to the DFE. Some are amazing to particular equipment sellers - IBM's AFP and Xerox VIPP, as an example - and some are more generalised or open, such as PPML or PDF/VT. While them all have been produced to explicitly support variable material, some originate from the text-based transactional print world, while the others are strongly directed at graphically-driven marketing and promotional applications.

There are several essential differences in the features of the printing models, specially with regard to design handling and specially in the level of support for sophisticated features such as for instance transparency. The ability to critique the VDP print stream for checking purposes varies also: the older models don't help any previewing at all, because the output record is assembled just at print time, while PPML careers can be examined but just with a separate viewer. PDF and PDF/VT may be previewed applying any PDF viewing application. Whatsoever DFE or RIP a printer has, it must have the ability to take and process VDP documents in the format that the client or internal business may supply.

Configurations in which VDP structure application, hand-off language, DFE/RIP and electronic press are all created and reinforced by the exact same vendor are one answer, and should assure compatibility and production but they could absence flexibility. If the entire VDP file design, database management, file construction, control, printing and finishing cycle is moved out under the printer's roof then tight integration between components need to generate a successful solution. But what are the results when a new customer needs to manage their particular repository to generate and send differently formatted VDP documents for productivity? Imagine if a brand new strategy idea calls for graphic features in the printed product which can be beyond what is presently supported?

The alternative is always to look for a generation system that can accept feedback in some of the common VDP forms and that has the required energy and flexibility to work productively with all them. An ideal process might also provide the capability to push several produce or type of digital press. That raises long-term freedom and increases get back on expense as the business enterprise grows and new pace, finishing or quality alternatives become available.