Reflecting on a recent XMPie webinar
By Jacob Aizikowitz, president, XMPie, A Xerox Company
Traditionally, high-volume, high-speed, personalized print applications, such as billing statements, were in the classical transactional space. Many transpromo applications were also based on classical or legacy transactional workflows (mainly characterized by the use of IPDS/AFP/ IJPDS as print workflow protocols).
With the advancements in print technology, introducing top quality color and a rich selection of substrates, together with high-speed and high-duty cycles, the door to attractive direct mail and modern transpromo applications became wide open. Advancements in DFE and RIP technologies also enabled the driving of such high-end inkjet and toner-based devices through the powerful PDF/VT (and similar) print workflows.
And this opened the door to leveraging XMPie software in such applications, making the inclusion of creatively compelling documents, and highly flexible design-to-production workflows possible.
The Webinar
We recently held a webinar covering the spectrum of high-volume, high-speed applications with XMPie software.
TCW Solutions shared their experience in creating a beautifully designed, highly personalized pension plan document for a large U.K. insurance company. The session conveyed the value of being able to use Adobe technology – not only for achieving a compelling pension plan document, but for having a highly efficient design-to-production workflow. Key highlights included:
- Creative without compromise.
- Revisions and changes are always possible, including just before production. Being able to stay within the InDesign document template all the way through and never being required to convert the document to some production-friendly format, is the key to these efficiencies.
- No surprise color and document reproduction (WYSIWYG).
TCW Solutions also emphasized that moving to a server-class solution from XMPie enabled them to gain dramatic improvements in overall composition time for the job as well as relieving their desktop stations to do further preparations for other jobs.
For the rest of the webinar, we explained a few important capabilities of the software, especially for demanding high-volume, high-speed applications. These focused mainly on XMPie software’s auto-scale ability whereby job processing leverages a high-degree of concurrent parallel processing across all cores of a given server as well as automatically scaling up to use other extension servers (if they are part of the processing cluster). We highlighted that the resulting output stream (the PDF/VT file) is highly compact and efficient, saving time on communicating it to the RIP and shortening RIP time due to optimally defined reusable objects.
We also covered quite a few insights on how to design for variable – what to do, what to avoid, and how to achieve certain effects in ways that will be non-compromising creatively and still highly efficient in composition time and overall compactness of the PDF/VT output stream. These insights included the right way of using layers and when to avoid them, how to manage transparency effects in order to avoid over taxing of the PDF/VT and the RIP, and how to make sure that placed variable content, such as images, are reusable and without introducing excessive file sizes.
If you’re interested in achieving high-speed, high-volume personalized printing with full creative freedom, watch the replay to learn more!
