What You Need For Efficient Personalised Variable Data Printing Computers Articles | April 12 http://www.vapormaxoutletsale.com/ , 2015
Variable data (VDP) or personalised printing is an added-value service that digital printers can offer their direct mail clients to enhance response rates and increase profitability. The entry costs for VDP are low as digital printers already have the hardware and only need to learn some new software skills in order to begin offering VDP services. This article explains what the key components are in a VDP worflow and how they work together.


Variable data print (VDP) is an added-value service that digital printers can offer their clients to help them achieve better results in their marketing through personalised and relevant direct mail that brings significantly increased response rates. Offering services like VDP or cross-media marketing also moves the printer closer to the client, helping them make the transition from commodity print service provider to trusted marketing partner, a more secure and profitable relationship.


Digital printers already have the equipment needed to produce VDP campaigns, so there's no great expenditure required to begin offering VDP to their clients; all that they need to understand is the software requirements and the workflow.


From the hardware perspective, a variable data print set-up looks like a lot like any other digital printing installation Red Nike VaporMax Outlet , with a digital press, a RIP or digital front-end (DFE) to drive it and whatever inline or offline finishing equipment is needed to turn printed sheets into sellable product. The differences from normal static print are mostly at the file creation and pre-press stages: the two main software components are the database and the authoring software, though VDP also puts some extra demands on the RIP or DFE.


As discussed elsewhere in this series, the printer doesn't necessarily have to own a database application, as long as the data needed for the personalisation can be extracted and supplied in CSV or Excel formats to use with the master template in the authoring application.


VDP authoring applications come in a variety of types. Some Blue Nike VaporMax Outlet , like PTI FusionPro (recently acquired by Ricoh), are plug-ins to popular professional design and layout tools such as Adobe InDesign or Illustrator. Others are dedicated VDP tools, or the printed output part of cross-media production suites; PrintShop Mail is an example of the former, while DirectSmile, XMPie and GMC Inspire are the latter. Vendors of DFEs andor digital presses also offer VDP creation tools White Nike VaporMax Outlet , such as the FreeForm tools that are included with every Fiery controller, or Xerox's Freeflow software.


Whichever type of authoring software is used, the same thing happens at print time: the customer-specific data - which may be both images and text - is fed into the variable fields in the layout template, according to the business rules assigned to the template. This generates a print stream which is sent to the DFE.


There are a number of different print hand-off formats for VDP, reflecting the history and origins of the technology in high-end transactional print. Some are vendor-specific Black Nike VaporMax Outlet , such AFP (Advanced Function Presentation) from IBM, VPS (Variable Print Specification) from Creo or Fiery FreeForm and FreeForm 2; some are open formats based on existing commercial graphic arts standards like PostScript or PDF. These include VIPP, an open VDP language from Xerox for output of PostScript files, and PDFVT, a variant of the PDF ISO standard that is optimised for VDP applications. PPML (Personalised Print Mark-up Language) is another open standard which allows use of PostScript Nike VaporMax China Outlet , PDF, EPS, JPEG and TIFF formats for pages or page components.


Which of these formats is supported will depend on the authoring software. Printer or DFE vendors' software will of course support their own equipment but may also support others, especially the open standards PPML and PDF or PDFVT. VDP and cross-media software from independent developers usually supports the widest range of options.


It's worth noting that not all the VDP formats are equivalent. The older, vendor-specific ones don't all support the same level of graphical flexibility Nike VaporMax Shoes Outlet , in particular the use of transparency and layer effects to combine images and variable type. For printers just starting with VDP, this is unlikely to present an immediate problem, but if your plans include producing customised images using variable data text, the more recent PDF and PDFVT standards are probably better options, though PPML has support for transparency too. PDF and PPML allow previewing of the print file for checking Cheap Nike VaporMax Outlet , though the latter requires a dedicated viewer.


The hand-off format also has to be understood by the DFE. Again, single-vendor solutions tend to support their own formats best