Details:
Summary:
During the journey from analogue production of printed products to today's digital production, many steps in the manufacturing process have been eliminated as well as the way printed products are produced.
Thanks to open networks and standardized file formats, such as PDF, new print workflows may successfully be engineered. This paper presents the development of such a workflow, where the traditional design activity has been divided into two separate activities: design and adaptation.
The design activity is done using graphic software to create a specified layout. The adaptation activity makes it possible to use the layout to produce print ready files with variable content, without graphic software and skills in graphic arts.
In the workflow from design to a print ready file several steps can be automated and sped up if layout and content (i.e. variable data such as name and address) are stored separately. Variable data can be merged with a predefined layout through which multiple print ready files can be produced automatically. This has some major benefits:
- Variable data can be changed without a layout/design program.
- A change in layout does not affect the variable data.
- Variable data can be used on arbitrary layouts.
- The graphic profile is kept intact.
- The merged data is not predefined to any file format.
This technique has mainly been applied on printed products such as business cards, letterheads, envelopes, product sheets and stickers, where the user data often is personal information and addresses. We will show how this workflow increases the productivity on the products above. Other benefits are less printing errors and making print products available to order on all networked computers. The same technique can be used to increase the efficiency on many types of print products that are repetitive but with changes in the content.