- The marketplace is filled with the vivid imaginations of people who are willing to believe in anything, given that it is well enough sold. The concept of printer independence is such a selling concept. The principle of printing anything anywhere is not achievable. SIMPLY - do not believe it!
- Vendors who make that claim, ask you to accept a simple, but essential pretext - a document can never look the same on different targets. None of the ANY-to-ANY solutions deals with print resources, therefore they substitute resources, which you as a user, developer or network manager are supposed to provide. As it is an unavoidable problem, the vendors claims to solve his problem - outputting to different formats, and in return asks you to solve yours - providing all the resources required to do so at the right target at the right time, in the right version and format!
- Essentially he leaves the much bigger problem - the resource management with the associated quality problems and effort and cost - TO YOU!
- The same is true for the data interfaces. Most systems on the market have very limited data interface capabilities to the point where the only accept one format. Which YOU have to provide -meaning to code - for ALL YOUR APPLICATIONS!
- This so called PREPPING step is either done in native coding or in a special script language and it generates the internal data format.
- The document layout has a similar problem. Even if you design on a PC platform you are using PC fonts in most cases or on of the printer fonts in the best case - but no other system uses a platform and printer independent font and forms format. For the formatter to able to work the metrics information of the fonts and graphics and forms size info has to be provided in internal format tables. A manual tedious process.
- The layout in most cases involves maybe a little forms drawing, but as soon as you talk about complex dynamic layouts, it involves programming without any professional support. For the formatter or composer to work you provide the internal formats to the platform in a cross compilation step.
- Now you can run the formatting and you generate either a printer format - full stop! or you generate a printer independent format which still needs to be converted in the same production run to the printer format. You cannot send this format to any standard print server as you can with Postscript or AFPDS!
- For each printer the resource synchronization is now manual step FOR EACH PRINTER AND TYPE and the you need to know exactly which printer you will be going to. The only way to avoid the resource problem is to imbed the resources in each print file. Not the most effective way to do this.
Max Pucher, ISIS Papyrus America max.pucher@isis-papyrus.com
Published by Lotus® Freelance Graphics®