PODi Sees Continued Strong Growth for Digital and Variable Data Printing

HP Indigo: "HP Indigo has a large number of customers using PPML for their VDP jobs; we're committed to it and will continue to support the format," said Alon Gazit, Director of R&D, HP Indigo. "We are also proud to support the PDF/VT standard. We recognize the need for higher efficiency in the entire workflow from creation to fulfillment and welcome the new format to help meet the needs of our VDP customers."

Pageflex: "PDF/VT brings users all the benefits of a PDF workflow - including reliable visual proofing, standardized preflight tools, and a superb imaging model for printing graphically-rich documents - while advancing the final critical step in VDP workflows: the efficient RIPing and printing of VDP jobs. Our customers run some of the most sophisticated variable data campaigns and have a range of requirements, so we see the need to support both PPML and PDF/VT," commented Costas Kitsos, VP Engineering for Pageflex.

Xerox: "Xerox support for standards is long standing," said Gavin Jordan-Smith, VP Production Workflow and Solutions for Xerox. "As technology develops and moves forward there is an increasing need to have standards that support the graphic communications environment. We see great potential for our customers especially related to automated workflows that integrate with business process management. This ultimately leads to super efficiencies with predictable productivity and both PPML and PDF/VT gets us there."

The merits of PDF/VT were recognized by the Printing Industries of American (PIA), which honored the format with a 2011 InterTech Technology Award. In summary, PDF/VT offers the following features:

• Support for the latest PDF imaging model, which can accurately render transparencies
• Existing tools can pre-flight and modify PDF/X4 and PDF/X5 files and can therefore be used for PDF/VT files
• The free Acrobat Reader can be used to preview and soft-proof PDF/VT files
• The preview/soft-proof/print file is one and the same so there are no discrepancies between what the customer sees and what gets printed
• Support for blind job exchange
• Distiller in combination with pdfmark can be used to convert optimized PostScript to PDF/VT (providing a simple migration path)

The established PPML (Personalized Print Markup Language) standard has been significantly enhanced with the recent release of PPML 3.0. In addition to supporting transparency, PPML 3.0 also supports transparency between layers. PPML supports native formats including EPS, jpg, tiff, PDF. PPML also offers high performance in streaming applications. The PPML standard is generally available to the marketplace. For more information, visit www.podi.org.