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Is a programming language for everyone?
Not the easiest question to answer. If the jobs you do are quite simple then the scripting will be ridiculously easy and the merge speed – in the range of 30,000 records per minute may make Jet Letter PSL worthwhile for you. Or the single function n-up capability or the simple PDF import ability might make Jet Letter PSL worthwhile. The examples and the tutorials provided make learning a snap. Soon to be announced drag ‘n drop tools will make both learning and simple set-ups very quick and easy.
If your work is more complex;
- Where every page is drastically different from the others,
- Where transactional documents could each be one or twenty pages long
- Where management of page "real estate" becomes an issue
- Where typesetting and word processing require attention to detail
- Then a scripting language is almost your only answer – and PSL becomes almost the only solution.
- Jet Letter PSL caters to a specific market – programming languages for variable data document production. Note that we have expanded "VDP" to "VDDP." Because, in this day and age documents get printed and mailed, e-mailed, presented on the web, and even broadcast to hand held devices.
Some of the traditional drag ‘n drop solutions, Print Shop Mail™ comes to mind, are very suitable tools for many firms desiring a VDDP capability. Some of the newer products, FusionPro™ and XMPie™ come to mind, have some serious flaws, such as merge speed, but are still the "right" solution for many firms.
We are hard at work on such a "drag ‘n drop" product at the moment. It’s a very real market – just not the market that the Jet Letter PSL programming language was designed for. In fact we use PSL as the foundation for our drag ‘n drop product.
Programming languages designed for VDDP (like Jet Letter PSL) are the right solution for firms desiring to perform the more difficult VDDP applications. If all you do is add in an address block, a name or two, a few variables and perhaps an image -- there are lots of products for you to choose from. And there are lots of direct mail firms using them for such (simple) applications.
The competition is fierce -- as you probably know -- and thus the margins are small. However, as the applications get more difficult, there are fewer VDDP products able to perform and thus fewer competitors for such business -- the margins get better. That's where PSL fits -- literally no job is too tough. Invoicing, statements, tax bills, utility bills, collection letters, health care billing, highly personalized marketing pieces -- that's where the money is and that's the kind of work Jet Letter PSL is good at.
Another important consideration is merge speed. Many current VDDP offerings merge as slow as a record a second. A ten thousand piece run, at that speed, takes nearly three hours to merge -- and nobody would think of starting to print before the merge is complete. (Those who do buy a lot of paper.)
Jet Letter PSL can merge a 10,000 piece job in less than 30 seconds!!! This is important to your business --very.
In the next few pages we will discuss this situation, to help you determine whether or not a programming language is for you.
PSL is Easy- English Like Scripting
If you want to do very simple things like place some variables on top of a provided PDF (or most any other graphic format), Jet Letter PSL could not be much simpler. To print a PDF that says "Hello World", you bring up the editor, type in "Hello World", hit the "Airplane (GO) button, and you get said PDF.
To change the paper orientation, the font to a different one, the size to 50 bold and, and the color to blue, you type in
{
setPaperOrientation landscape
setFont "Helvetica-bold", 50
setColor blue
}
Hello world!
For that matter you can simply drag this piece of code onto the PSL editor and hit the airplane button. When you hit "Help" you get a tiered list of all the commands and you can simply browse the list and copy a command into your script – you don’t have to "know" all the commands and type them in.
That’s it.
You can move "Hello World" around just by using normal keyboard functions. This moves "Hello World" to a more readable location (using the Enter key and the space bar), and a different font.
{
setPaperOrientation landscape
setFont "Helvetica-bold", 50
setColor blue
}
Hello world!
There are many such examples in some documents that come with the distribution;
textFormatting.doc,
colorControl.doc,
programming.doc.
and some others.
Another document in the "docs" file is "A Very Basic Introduction to PSL.doc." It is a road map to learning Jet Letter PSL. We would suggest that it is the first document to look at.
(These are found in the "docs" folder in the distribution and we call them the "primers.")
The bottom line is that simple things you might want to do are, in fact, simple in Jet Letter PSL.
However, and without any apologies, it soon can get difficult. Printing to text boxes or format boxes, or scaling images, or fitting images to image boxes, or doing rotations can get a bit challenging – but the examples usually make it pretty simple. . We provide many examples, as in hundreds, tutorials, and primers to help along the way. But – it takes some dedication! If you are not willing or able to devote the effort – Jet Letter PSL is not for you.
Then again, such dedication gives your firm or your department a very significant competitive edge. ALL of our customers will attest to that – they are growing.
Is Programming Experience Required?
The answer is no! However, while the simple things are so easy that no programming experience is necessary; a person wanting to enjoy the real benefits of PSL, and gain that competitive edge, will have to learn some basic programming skills as well as the Jet Letter PSL language. Jet Letter PSL includes a primer on programming. It’s a pretty good start at it.
Jet Letter PSL allows you to track all of your changes!
More and more, in these difficult economic times, YOU don’t have to learn anything, just hire us to do it for you. A growing list of customers are achieving good result in this fashion.
However, back to programming experience. Strangely enough, its not experience that counts but aptitude. For many of our traditional and newer clients, programming was just not in their resume, but for whatever reason (such as merge speed) they bought the product. Many of those (not all) have become excellent with the product and produced work that gained their firm that important competitive edge. It’s an aptitude thing -- and the easy test is to try it.
Also, we might point out that a three day training exercise pays off handsomely.
There are two other scenarios. Those with serious programming backgrounds (VB, C, PHP, Java, Foxpro, etc.) absolutely love PSL and will have no problems; those with lesser skills, but an affinity for computers will experience a quick learning curve.
Existing Jet Letter users have a bit of a speed bump to overcome (see below) but normally are up to speed quickly.
Prospects with no such skills or aptitudes need to think long and hard about the suitability of this product for their firm. A drag ‘n drop solution might be better suited. We have no interest in acquiring problem accounts. The simple solution is to try a 30 day demo. It’s free, we throw in some webinar time to get you started and will devote some time to setting up your first few applications – sort of a "try and buy" program.
HOWEVER, there is a very key concept associated with Jet Letter PSL. If you have it, and still mostly run simple jobs – you will know that when the more challenging opportunity comes by you can say YES with authority. One new customer can pay for PSL very quickly!
This one is easy. Microsoft Word™ is not suitable for serious production work. When volumes of work exceed say one thousand records, Word will often fail. The cost is often reams of paper and missed production schedules. We have testimonials to that which we would be happy to provide. The learning curve is not that much different – for the easy jobs.
For the harder jobs – well, it’s either Jet Letter PSL or one of the drag ‘n drop solutions.
Sometimes, for very simple, short jobs, it’s quicker to set up a job in Word™ or one of the drag n’ drop solutions (including our forthcoming offering). We don’t argue that. What we do say, however that is the minute it gets a little more difficult sometimes, a programming language is in fact quicker.
Jet Letter PSL uses are generally fans of a programming language. They understand, and in many cases, have built their businesses on a programming language – Jet Letter. It has given them the "competitive advantage" they used to build their businesses to date. PSL, we feel, is in that same category – the competitive advantage on which to build their businesses for the next five years.
However, there is a speed bump. Jet Letter PSL is not the same. While in many cases it is similar; setMargin sounds familiar, as does lj, cj, etc. Jet Letter PSL is new and different. It is, in fact, more complex as it does so much more. It’s based on PDF which has its own peculiarities.
What we have seen to date is that died in the wool Jet Letter programmers run in to a serious "speed bump"; once over that they love it. But we should comment that the speed bump is steep.
The comment often heard is that Jet Letter is not broken – we don’t need a fix. Often that is true. We suggest that such users look at;
color – PDF is miles ahead of PCL
typesetting – again PDF and PSL are miles ahead
word processing – there PSL is miles ahead of Jet Letter
Image import and manipulation – same story.
Why we think, that for those so inclined, it’s a very worthwhile investment – in time and money.
Discussion of the use of a programming language for VDDP is a bit like discussing religion. Some folks would not even consider another business method; others would just not bother thinking about it. The next few topics cover some of the issues.
With a programming language you have complete control of what is being printed on a page. There is no guess work, you get what you want – not what some programmer thought you might want when you checked a box.
You can do "just about anything" with a programming language – that’s what scripting languages are all about. Programmers can have precise control of any typographic issue -- fonts, placements, leading, slant and rotation, color and color fill, shadowing, word and character spacing down to the one character at a time level.
Control of word processing issues such as wrap, widows and orphans, justification, scaling, and even applying these features to boxes defined on the page. Image manipulation can be very tightly controlled including scaling, opacity, transparency (for layering images or text), and of course fitting images to boxes in a variety of ways (fit horizontally, fit vertically, best fit and force fit to a box). The list goes on more...
The issues discussed above are really the simple ones. The "complexity issues" involved in a mail merge operation are much more interesting. In order to achieve the best postal discounts and, as well as shop floor production economies, it is often necessary to produce a wide variety of documents in one print run. Often there are no two pages alike.
Think of a direct mail company whose customers are collection agencies. "Our" customer may have 20 collection agencies as customers – each of whom might have dozens of clients for whom they do collection work. A given production run might involve letters to be delivered in each of all fifty states, each of whom have regulations regarding required paragraphs and fonts, font sizes and so forth. Each production run will therefore involve printing on lots of different letterhead, including one of many different signatures, and in various formats.
Furthermore many of these letters need to be archived and some made available for web presentment as well.
The logic is mind boggling – and a perfect scenario for a programming language – such as Jet Letter PSL.
On the promotional side, suppose a chain of car dealerships desires a promotion to their customer base, where they know what the prospect is now driving, where he lives and some family demographics. The marketing piece could be required to:
show a picture of the current car and the latest model of it,
some personalized language based on family demographics.
a picture of the store manager, his signature and,
a vicinity map and image of the dealership.
This application is right up our alley!!!
On the other hand, merge speeds get to be a real important issue. Jet Letter PSL merges at about 30,000 records a minute. The often asked question is; "Well if it keeps up with my printer, what do I care?" The answer is simple. You would like to find out if the merge was successful well before you start to print it. You certainly don’t want to start printing, and thus wasting paper and time if you are printing garbage.
The math is simple. Let’s look at a 20,000 record job – about average for a mail shop. At merge speeds of a record a second (NOT uncommon in some products) you are looking at an elapsed time for the merge of something like five hours. In Jet Letter PSL it would be less than a minute. There is some serious value in that.
Inclusion in Work Flow and Websites
A programming language, such as Jet Letter PSL, can usually be integrated in overall enterprise work flow systems. While the Jet Letter PSL system comes with an attractive, colorized, development environment (editor), it remains at heart a command line system and so can call and be called by other programs. In fact it can be presented as a few dlls and called by most any language – such as PHP..
Call backs. Jet Letter PSL has "Warnings" and "Errors." Errors cause cessation of the run. Warnings deal with such things as a text overflow of a box and processing is not stopped . Both are logged, presented on the "console" and can call a call back function to deal with the warning or error. The call back – could elicit;
- a notification of that occurrence to the calling program, or
- invocation of a function written by the user to deal with the situation.
Call backs are also available for other events in the program such as end of file, start or end of page, text overflow, end of document (program).
Call Library. The main program for one of the more complex applications of Jet Letter PSL – 17 forms, 12 languages – was one line long – a call library statement. It called a function based on data in the input file to produce the desired form, based again on data in the merge file, in the language of choice.
In one test case a PHP program called Jet Letter PSL to produce a (very simple) statement based on customer ID. These statements were rendered by PSL and presented in a browser. The "bandwidth" was on the order of two hundred statements a second.
Jet Letter PSL emits PDF individually or in a file, and PostScript files. These are processed at lightning speeds –like 30,000 records a minute. Most popular bit map formats, JPEGs, TIFs, GIFs, etc can be produced at slightly slower speeds – say 100 milliseconds apiece.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Jet Letter PSL is that it is a thoroughly modern and robust programming language. Where in other such systems one might perform the more difficult programming tasks in another language, calling PSL as a rendering engine, much of this programming can be done in Jet Letter PSL. File handling, including OBDC capabilities, table manipulations, rational operators, math to any degree of precision, and string processing to deal with cumbersome files are included.
In many drag ‘n drop solutions – when required -- one drops into Java, or some DOS like language when more control is desired. These are not in the same ballpark as Jet Letter PSL! Can you imagine dealing with the length of descenders in a font with Java?
Now, we are hard at work on a drag ‘n drop product. It will produce Jet Letter PSL: programs.
A blast e-mail system is built into Jet Letter PSL.
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