I was working with Postscript in the late 1980’s. You would think with technology this old everything has already been done. However, with the advent of PDF and the internet, everything old is new again.

We have been doing work for a digital printing seller and a seller of products with custom screen printing on them. The two customers have web sites in which customers can go to a web page and use the page to create various cards and other printed material. The problem both printing vendors are facing is that the technology to put all of these elements together on a web site is very different that what the technology it takes to print them on a digital printing press and be able to make money doing it in volume.

With web content to printing press, we have been working on solutions for a number of problems:

1. What you see on a HTML web page is not a printable layout because it flows when the screen changes.
2. When someone works with images on the web they need to work in low resolution so they don’t wait forever when moving around images.
3. Even if a master PDF image is created on the web site, you usually print two or more on one press sheet.
4. For each user to be able to design custom material on the web, whoever prints it needs to be able to do it as automated as possible. If the printing vendor has to open every customer design in Photoshop or Quark, he will lose money.

Because of these problems, we have designed a command line OPI (Open Prepress Interface) program and a command line page layout program. The command line OPI program will take any high resolution images and make a low resolution PDF which can be easily worked with on a web site. When the user selects this image on the web and the server sends it down for printing, the digital printing press will substitute the high resolution image so the final product does not look jagged. The command line page layout program will take a blank press sheet or background image and allow you to paste various pages or images on top of it. When you put a batch file around this command line page layout program, a web site can automate the creation of various jobs press sheets.

For each of these jobs some custom programming was required. At some point, we will probably include a generic version of them in our Collate product either as menu selection or utility programs that come along with it.

For anyone who needs OPI or Automated Page Layout for content from a web site, these programs will be good addition but you may still need some custom programming to really make it all work for you. If you are interested you can contact us by visiting www.JetSoftDev.com or www.ScanHelp.com.