by Thomas Bougher
3. August 2011 00:28
Earlier this year Jet Letter introduced their latest suite of variable data printing solutions, PSL PageBuilder PRO and PSL PageBuilder. Having worked with printing and mailing for more years than I care to mention I can truly marvel at the power this product delivers to the desktop and at its affordable price.
My first exposure to variable printing as such came in the middle 1980’s I was working for McCain Manufacturing Corporation who manufactured high speed saddle binding systems to assemble the millions of national magazines of the day such as Time and Newsweek. The big technological advance of the day was the addition of ink jet addressing that ran in line with the saddle binder. These systems could put a four line address on the outside of the magazine eliminating the need for slow labelers. What a break through!!
The systems advanced to add inside printing capability so that the reply card inside the magazine could also be pre-addressed. Additional line capability became available so that the first personalized messaging could be included along with the recipient information. With a price tag topping $500,000 for the addressing systems alone this technology was only available to publishers of the largest magazines.
In 1984 Apple™ introduced the Macintosh™ desktop computer, along with the laser printer and graphical interface, and desktop publishing was born. The first application by a then relatively small Redmond, Washington company produced was Word for the Mac. I still remember one of the coolest capabilities in Word was mail merge. It was painfully slow and would choke your Mac but what joy, I could create personalized letters!
Twenty years later I found myself in the digital printing industry as a production print specialist. The quality of digital output was nearing that of offset. And just as exciting were the advances in color management & control as well as the advances in variable printing capability. The industry had finally moved beyond simple personalized text to personalized graphics and images. The on demand print industry became the on demand marketing industry.
Still, if you had the need to create highly complex documents your solutions options were limited and expensive. Only the “big boys” could play in the lucrative transactional arena. Highly variable multi-page documents requiring complex logic to control images and text flow were still beyond the average print service provider. The skill set required to code these complex jobs required specialized programming knowledge and experience.
In 2011 those barriers were broken. The disruptive technology in variable data printing solutions such as the PSL PageBuilder suite have destroyed those barriers. Complex variable documents such as statements can be created easily, quickly and without specialized skill sets. The drag & drop code writing wizard in the PageBuilder suite along with a true WYSIWYG design interface bring ease of use, speed in designing documents while keeping the full power of over 800 VDP commands.
In today’s multimedia world the ability to communicate1:1 is the ability to be heard above the noise. Any document can now be personalized to speak directly to the reader. Any print service provider can now produce profitable personalized communications to grow their business. The price point is now low enough to make entry affordable for anyone looking to leverage their investment in digital.
Disruptive technology! Variable data printing without compromise. An uncompromising price.