Written by David Kirk, Manager, Xerox FreeFlow VI Suite Development at Xerox Corporation
And you thought Name and Address blocks were easy…
Sure they can be easy when you have names that are short and straightforward. But what about when you have one of those long names, such as “Mary-Anne Richardson-Smith”? Or John Jacob Jingleheimer-Schmidt? And what about when your data isn’t pristine – maybe there are case issues and empty lines? These can all lead to ugly results when you are trying to put your best foot forward.
These are all things you are going to have to deal with when working with a Name and Address block. With the Xerox® FreeFlow® VIPP Pro Publisher®, all these issues can be resolved with a few clicks of the mouse. VIPP Pro Publisher is a plug-in to Adobe’s® In-Design® for the creation of variable data jobs. It is platform independent software and allows for incorporation of variable text and imagery inside an industry standard layout program. It is easy to use and has built-in “safety” features to ensure your print output will look professional by controlling how the variable data will print.
Let’s look at our data file. Typically your data should go through some type of postal cleansing process before using as production data, but as we can see here in this example, that does not always happen.
Now let’s look at the InDesign application, straight away we can see a few areas that we will have to fix.
In the application shown below the pink area highlights some case issues we will need to address. The blue highlight shows a truncated text string, we will need to adjust the job title text so it fits within the designed space. The Green and purple highlights show a blank line in the address, we need to suppress the blank line and move the text in purple up.
These are all fairly common issues when dealing with variable data and name and address blocks. All of these can be fixed quickly and easily using the VIPP Pro Publisher. See for yourself – Click here for a video for a quick demonstration.
For more information about FreeFlow VIPP Pro Publisher and the tools available in the VI Suite, please visit http://www.xerox.com/digital-printing/workflow/freeflow/variable-information-suite/enus.html
