The rise of print on demand
The concept of Print-on-Demand (POD for short) began in 1990. Xerox has developed the DocuTech Express printer, which can receive electronic files or scan documents directly, store these files in the system and reprint them as needed. In 1993, the emergence of high-quality digital presses made it possible to print high-quality, full-color, personalized prints.
On-demand printing technology means a revolution for the printing industry, at least for short-run printing. By on-demand printing, it is possible to organize content for each potential reader; on the other hand, the end user can determine the number of prints and part or all of the content. In fact, on-demand printing provides a completely new publishing operation model.
Compared with the traditional publishing process, on-demand printing technology has the advantages of low risk, short cycle, etc. It is very suitable for the printing of short-run and out-of-print books, personal publishing, various industry standards, technical standards, college textbooks, academic monographs, etc. The publication. Today, many large publishing groups, including Ingram, Simon and Schuster, and Barnes & Noble, have joined the ranks of promoting on-demand printing technology.
Nowadays, more and more things are suitable for POD, and the range of applications can become very wide. Actually, printing on demand has become a method, and various applications are slowly being developed. How to use, you can do whatever you like.
Personalized charm
Originally conceived of POD, people think that it is more cost. Gradually, the charm of the personalized POD service manifests itself. On-demand printing can take into account the individual requirements of the reader, and it can provide a variety of options including paper, format, etc. The average consumer is willing to spend a certain amount of money on the diversified choice of reading materials. Therefore, on-demand printing has a mature service and application environment.
In the POD process, documents are stored digitally. Electronically stored documents can be updated or replaced as necessary, always the latest version to be printed. In digital format, the contents of the document can be stored chapter by chapter. Therefore, they can be re-assembled at the time of printing according to the customer's needs, resulting in a unique document. For example, a custom device manufacturer can store maintenance information for each product feature separately, and a manual for a specific device can be printed by combining different chapters (product features). In addition, the content of the document is objectified and can also be reused.
Most importantly, personalized printing is a high value-added application. Prints with unique content are more economical than prints with hundreds or thousands of copies. Readers react better to information produced for themselves. Personalized printing allows everyone to really get what they want. In addition, printing of commercial letters, mail order forms, and bank credit cards can also benefit from personalized printing.
POD technology can be widely used in the field of personalized printing. Personalized applications have also become the latest and most promising application of POD.
Bottlenecks, problems and solutions
Although the above advantages are printed on demand, the printing industry is not quick to adopt this technology. One of the reasons is that while the digital press itself can perform high-speed printing. However, there is a bottleneck in the process of converting digital data (page description) into high-resolution rasterized data (referred to as a process called raster image processing in the conventional workflow, referred to as RIP). In the traditional RIP process, the page description is only once by the RIP. After the printing plate is made, a large number of pages are printed on the machine. However, for personalized printing, each file is unique, and therefore RIP processing must be performed (at least in part) independently.
The RIP process requires strong computing power. If a machine processes 6 A4 pages per minute at a resolution of 600 dpi, RIP needs to generate 13.4 million pixels per second. The higher the printing speed, the higher the value of the machine.
Many vendors are aware of this problem, but the standard languages ​​used in the industry, such as the Postscript language, as a page description language, do not have the concept of objects and cannot implement object buffering and reuse. The PDF language also cannot handle changeable page content. As a result, vendors use only dedicated solutions that allow the system to recognize recurring content. These recurring content can be RIP only once and then stored. This type of system greatly improves performance. However, due to the use of proprietary protocols, interoperability has become impossible, and the entire industry has increasingly deviated from the standard. Dedicated programs limit innovation, as well as potential third-party developers.
The organization called the "Print on Demand Initiative Alliance" (PODi), a major manufacturer in the industry, is committed to promoting digital printing technology, and through the establishment of standards to promote the interoperability of equipment suppliers to guide the development of digital printing. The research conducted by PODi also shows that one of the most important reasons for hindering the market acceptance of on-demand printing is the lack of uniform standards.
As we all know, the entire printing process involves many processes such as editing, typesetting, imposition, RIP, printout, and binding. Each link has different variables. The software and hardware devices involved in printing come from different vendors, such as monochrome, color digital printers and front-end processing software that are the core of the entire POD system. Therefore, there must be a standard for achieving efficient and personalized printing.
Personalized printed PPML standard
After researching PODi, in March 2000, the Personalized Print Markup Language (PPML) was released.
The PPML language takes into account the issue of content reuse in addition to the RIP efficiency issues discussed earlier. Therefore, drawing on the achievements of current software and network development, the PPML language is based on the standard XML language. The process of formulating the PPML language is actually modeling the personalized printing and using the XML language to describe the process.
In the PPML language, the description reaches the object level. The page content can be downloaded to the press as a named object. The downloaded naming objects can be reused without having to download and process them again.
The main advantages of the PPML language can be summarized as the following:
1. Support content reuse, "Download once, RIP once, print multiple times";
2. It is an open standard and does not require usage fees;
3. Ability to support all different page description languages ​​such as PS, PDF, PCL, AFP, etc.
4. Support pipelined and batch or application.
Problems Considered in PPML Development
In addition to the aforementioned goals, considering the status quo in the industry, the development of the PPML language does not pursue perfection, but considers issues from the perspective of solving the most pressing problems.
Due to the rapid growth of variable data printing and the spread of incompatible proprietary formats, the industry urgently needs cross-platform solutions. For the quick release, the current version of the PPML language does not include post-processing processes such as binding. Therefore, it is necessary to further develop or formulate new standards to standardize this part.
In order to be successful, PPML format must be able to attract current and future printing system suppliers as well as personalized printing software vendors. Therefore, under the premise of guaranteeing interoperability, PPML has made as few basic function rules as possible, thus leaving enough room for different vendors to implement special systems with different characteristics.
In addition, in the development process, since the XML language itself does not have the function of processing dot matrix data, and dot matrix data is used in a large amount in printing, it must be processed and extended. However, the W3C that developed XML has also realized this and is also studying new extension standards. In order to ensure compatibility with the W3C's future standards, how to make the transition has become a big problem. Finally, the PPML language development team decided to use MIME for outermost encapsulation to solve this problem. Because the MIME standard is widely used in e-mail transmission and other fields, incompatible extensions to the XML standard are avoided.
PPML language other important features
1. Support both embedded content and external content
The traditional printing format transmits complete data files to printers and printers. PPML supports references to external content data units. These external content data can be stored on local hard disks, intranets, or the Internet. Of course, a series of new issues related to this must be dealt with, such as the archiving of print jobs and duplication, management of buffered information, and so on.
2. Manufacturing and technical requirements
In addition to the representation of layout and reuse aspects, PPML also contains manufacturing-related information. This information is beyond the scope of the description of the page content itself and actually describes how these pages are handled in an environment that automates large numbers of digital printing. For example, imposition, binding, and other manufacturing-related data.
3 support variable file length
Personalized printed documents not only change in content or layout, but also change the number of pages. This will have a major impact on the imposition and other related production workflows. PPML provides good support for this.
4. Support buffering pre-rasterized objects
The PPML language supports buffering of pre-rasterized objects. Therefore, printing systems that support PPML must be able to page the rasterized objects. This requires strong support for overprinting. At the same time, things have become more complicated because of the need to support mixed content data formats.
PPML is widely supported and used in products
Support for the PPML standard can be seen from the list of PODi members. Currently, members of PODi include major players in the industry such as Adobe, Agfa, Barco, Electronics for Imaging, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi Koki, IBM, Indigo, Lexmark, MediaFlex, Minolta, NexPress, Nimblefish, Oce, Pageflex, Scitex, Xeikon, and Xerox.
Equipment and application software supporting the PPML language have been exhibited at Drupa 2000. For example, Xeikon's CSP 320D and DCP 500D digital presses integrate Xeikon's own front-end application system, Emerge DFE, which supports the PPML standard. The NexPress 600dpi NexPress 200 press adopts the NexStation front end based on Adobe's Extreme architecture. In addition to supporting full PDF/PJTF, it also provides PPML language support.
Conclusion
With the upsurge of electronic books, on-demand printing technology has been rapidly accepted and it has begun to penetrate into every corner of the publishing industry. However, the development trend of information technology is to replace atoms with "bits", and the publication of paper media will eventually be replaced by electronic publishing. Traditional publishing will eventually transition to electronic publishing. Since on-demand printing features both traditional publishing and future electronic publishing, print-on-demand printing is more easily accepted by people than pure electronic books for the publishing industry and consumers in transition. The same electronic transformation provides a buffer period. Therefore, for a long time to come, on-demand printing will exist as part of diversified publishing and information services.
The development and improvement of on-demand printing technology is closely related to the development of computer and network technologies. The emergence of the PPML language based on the XML standard can promote the application of on-demand printing technology on the one hand, and it also lays the foundation for the convergence of paper media publishing, web publishing and eBook.
On-demand Printing and Personalized Printing Markup Language
December 24 09:07:22, 2023
Eva Bag,Eva Plastic Bag,Eva Mesh Beach Bag,Eva Zipper Packaging Bag Dongguan Junkai Packaging Products Co., Ltd , https://www.diystoragecase.com