Making it personal

Making it personal

Can we reap the benefits of customisation in wide-format production? The answer is yes, says Sophie Matthews-Paul.

There is a school of thought which still believes that, in wide-format print, there is little need for variable data printing or the kind of personalisation and versioning to which we've all become accustomed. On-demand digital output brought with it the capabilities of varying text and images from sheet to sheet which has proved immensely valuable. This is evident in areas such as direct marketing, circulars and other advertising forms that can be targeted directly at the customer who is far more likely to pay attention to a personally addressed page of information than a generic communication. VDP is efficient and it works. This same VDP capability in the wide-format sector obviously appeals to different types of organisations but, in a world where roll-fed and flatbed printers are no longer challenging the short-run market but entering the realms of volumes well into the hundreds, it now begins to have a strong validity in display production. Earlier printers' throughput rates were sufficiently gentle in pace to allow applications containing individual elements to be Ripped individually without there being any deterioration in output speeds. Now that printing machines are coming to market which offer throughputs of up to 500m2/hr, the principles and desires are changing when it comes to the types of job being processed. Digital print has always scored over its analogue screen-printing and offset-litho counterparts with short and medium length runs. Where traditional processes fell down came with the inability to personalise jobs - for example, often the only way to compromise was by swapping the black plate or using a spot colour for changing information but even this wasn't practicable for single prints. Today's wide-format printers, and not only those in the upper echelons of throughput speeds, are being relied on for higher volumes and greater variations within applications to promote their versatility over analogue processes. With processing power enabling higher quality and larger, more complex files to be Ripped, the log-jam which used to lie at the post-print end of the production has now moved to the pre-press side.

Present speeds have reached the rate where the machine can be sitting, waiting, for different versions of what is essentially the same file to be sent across. VDP should be usable in wide-format digital print. There are two conventional methods of incorporating it, the first being to combine the graphic image and the variable information for the Rip but this could be seen to defeat the purpose on long run jobs; processing might be automated but there aren't really any time benefits. The second option is where a dedicated application is used to combine the elements into an optimised print stream so that the Rip only has to handle the constant data once. Certainly, businesses involved in display and related production are keen on the idea and it's not just restricted to users at the high end but, sometimes, it's worth taking a simplistic approach to assess the benefits. A true example of a typical user with a print-and-cut eco-solvent printer demonstrating the value of proper versioning was when a company was asked to produce a series of bibs for a halfmarathon. The easiest way to achieve this would have been to use data streaming to enable the job to be personalized with individual numbers, runners' names etc. on a generic background. But, at the time, this couldn't be achieved; so, instead of taking a matter of hours to output the job, the operation actually took several days. Move this up the scale and imagine a print-house taking an order for 500 large-scale prints all containing the same background image but each requiring an individual detail, such as a name. Cases like these drive home the relevance of VDP in wide-format, and the convenience and time-saving which results. Rip manufacturers and other software specialists are now beginning to tackle the question of variable data, with Wasatch already well on-course with its SoftRip, and Roland VersaWorks including the ability for users to merge .txt and.csv  files with predesigned templates. But Adobe's PDF Print Engine 2 (APPE) is likely to have an impact on bringing customised content to more print markets, also unifying prepress functions. Caldera's Joseph Mergui believes that APPE is the way forward and he's already defined his company's direction. "This is a way to say to the wide-format market that we believe in the value of PDF from creation to Rip, including VDP, and we will be enabling users to benefit from PDF/VT by embedding this is in Caldera products." Other manufacturers are sure to follow but efficient processing of variable data is already proving to be an essential part of the analogue to digital transition, and printers need to benefit from the flexibility that this feature can bring.