Pre-media

Digital print got a serious speed boost at Drupa with a massive amount of activity from equipment vendors launching faster machines that are available today, in addition to previewing concepts that go into larger formats and even faster speeds that should be commercially available over the next couple of years.

While a lot of the headlines may have been garnered by the high performance of the latest printing hardware there has been a quiet revolution in workflow and software that is needed to drive it, which it is hoped will have at least as much impact on the adoption of digital print, and more specifically the uptake of personalisation. Today only 10% of digital pages are personalised, and that’s 10 years after Peppers & Rogers [a seminal book on one-to-one marketing], says Adobe APPE senior product manager Mark Lewiecki.

Adobe used the first day of the show to unveil its next-generation RIP platform, Adobe PDF Print Engine 2 (APPE 2), which it hopes will help to increase that percentage. APPE 2 is the underlying software that firms such as Creo, EFI, HP, Screen and Xerox will use as the basis for their digital print workflow products in the future. It builds on where APPE, which was launched at Ipex 2006, started out. Essentially both flavours of APPE provide native processing of the latest versions of PDF rather than needing to convert to PostScript. The importance of that is that the latest versions support all the rich graphic features, such as transparency, that DTP tools InDesign and QuarkXPress use to make more compelling pages; as well as support for JDF for controlling the workflow and the use of ICC for colour management. Since the introduction of the original APPE there has been a strong uptake and implementation; there are now more than 2,000 sites running APPE around the world.

With APPE 2 Adobe is adding all those workflow, image quality and flexibility benefits to personalised print, aka variable data print (VDP). There’s more to this story than APPE 2, it goes hand in hand with a new flavour of PDF, called PDF/VT, where the ‘V’ stands for variable and the ‘T’ for transactional, which is optimised for, well, variable data, including transactional personalised printing.

The current VDP workflows grew up on an ad-hoc basis with firms developing their own tools to get around the limits of the file formats and computing power of yesterday. Examples of these formats include VIPP, VPS, VDX and JLYT, but Lewiecki questions whether people, especially agencies and designers, know, or care, about their existence, which is one of the things hampering the uptake of personalisation. Everyone knows about PDF, he says.

Raising the standard
The ubiquity of PDF and its support for advanced graphics features are behind the development of PDF/VT. In fact it’s not the first attempt at standardised VDP file format. The industry has already developed PPML, which is a PDF-based VDP format, and is in fact enshrined as a standard: ISO 16612-1:2005.

The idea behind PDF/VT is to provide a common file format with all the strengths of the proprietary formats, thus making them unnecessary. The industry is behind the concept says Martin Bailey, chief technology officer of Global Graphics, the main rival to Adobe in the RIP market. We’re fully behind the goals of PDF/VT, he says. We have to make transparency and variable data more efficient, we’re working on that and hope PDF/VT is part of that.

But as both Bailey and Lewiecki say, the specification for PDF/VT isn’t yet tied down and is expected to rumble on in committee stage until the end of next year. Despite that, it’s worth understanding what it’s all about, as it will have a major impact on the uptake of personalisation.

I think it is a pretty big deal, says Kodak GCG vice president marketing and channels, enterprise solutions Jon Bracken. Anything that makes the whole workflow more straightforward must be a good thing. Variable data has been around since 1995, but tools for designers have held up adoption.

EFI senior director, product marketing Kathy Wilson adds: If you look at the adoption of any technology it starts at the tip of the iceberg. We’re at that stage. Adobe wants to expand that to a much broader section of the market.

That expansion of the market has to start with creating demand with designers and agencies. Adobe’s Lewiecki says: The aim is to simplify the upstream business workflow, APPE 2 is the on-ramp to VDP.

Two of the biggest bugbears with today’s VDP design tools are proofing and pre-flighting. Today you either need the source application or a special viewer to proof, there is no common viewer, which leads to parallel workflows whereas PDF can be used for proofing, approval and production, says Lewiecki. There’s no easy way to pre-flight, he adds. The pre-flighting of VDP today is to run off a few copies.

Addressing the front end and making it easier to design and proof VDP is all well and good, but if it’s successful and does increase demand for personalised print there also need to be the tools at the output end to enable the printer to produce the promised deluge of digital pages. Within APPE 2 Adobe promises the tools to speed up processing of VDP pages. APPE 2 eliminates redundant processing of repeated elements, says Lewiecki. It determines the cache-worthiness of the element, which enables intelligent cache management by the OEM.

Need for power
Caching is the process of peering into a file and seeing what elements, such as pictures, are repeatedly used, ripping them once and firing them on to the page each time they’re needed, which cuts down on the time taken to process each page.

Cutting down on unnecessary processing improves efficiency – with some digital presses now running at thousands of pages per minute and some firms reaching the situation where they have banks of machines pumping out personalised content – but there’s a need for sheer power. The architecture is fully scalable, it’s been written from the ground up so our OEMs, who want to drive high-speed presses, can configure parallel APPE blade servers to drive engines at rated speeds, says Lewiecki.

While Adobe is talking about future technology, an example of this sort of workflow was at Drupa. HP was showing its Smart Stream Ultra server. This tower of power, or 168 Harlequin RIPs running on blade servers, can drive a bank of 32 Indigo 7000 or 64 5500 presses flat out with personalised pages and is capable of processing 2,200 A3 spreads of VDP per minute. HP is achieving that speed today using Global Graphics’ latest Harlequin RIP, which uses a technology called Retained Raster – its own clever caching tool.

But in the words of EFI’s Wilson all of this is just plumbing. The last word on the importance of improved VDP production and the latest high productivity presses goes to Kodak’s Bracken: The economic driver is to get a return on marketing spend. Why ultimately would you use static pages if it were cost-effective to customise? Response rates increase if you get truly targeted.

THE ALTERNATIVE: XPS
PDF/VT is not the only format that has the potential to make personalised print workflows easier to implement and more efficient. XPS, the graphics format at the heart of Microsoft’s latest operating system Vista is also eminently suited to handling variable data. According to Global Graphics chief technology officer Martin Bailey, from a technical point of view XPS is an ideal format to form the basis of a personalised print workflow.

XPS is XML in a ZIP wrapper with image components, building an XPS VDP file isn’t rocket science, he says. I have seen some indications that XPS might be taking off for that application.

The bottleneck affecting XPS uptake is that of the deployment of Vista by business, as to date it’s been largely consumers and not companies that have taken the plunge. But Bailey believes that’s a question of when not if; and adds that in Windows Server 2008 a tool called Easy Print will mean XPS begins to be widely used by corporate customers.

In anticipation of this both Global Graphics, with version 8 of the Harlequin RIP, and EFI in the latest version of the Fiery have introduced native XPS processing and there are third-party developers such as Nixps developing tools to turn XPS files into PDF for production printing.