Controlling Media and Finishing Across Cutsheet Devices
Welcome to the world of digital printing, where technology continues to push boundaries, making print production more efficient and versatile than ever before. This SolimarSecrets video will explore the intriguing capabilities of controlling media and finishing operations across cutsheet devices, a game-changer for the printing industry.
Defining the Concept
At its core, controlling media and finishing across cutsheet devices is all about having the ability to manage the entire print process, from selecting different media sources to applying finishing operations like stapling, drilling, and folding at both sheet and job levels. This level of control offers unprecedented flexibility and opens the door to a world of creative possibilities.
Page Level Finishing: A Game-Changer
Traditionally, finishing operations were applied at the job level, meaning the entire file received the same treatment. However, page-level or subset finishing allows individual sheets or groups within a file to be treated differently. Imagine you’re producing variable data saddle-stitched books with varying sheet counts. You can select a preprinted cover from one tray and thinner interior sheets from another while controlling an inline saddle stitcher and adding colored slipsheets or cover letters between books. This automation eliminates manual labor, reduces errors, and boosts productivity.
The Rise of Cutsheet Inkjet Printers
In recent years, cutsheet inkjet printers have been gaining ground. While continuous-feed inkjet printers are highly productive and cost-effective, cutsheet devices offer unique advantages. They are more flexible, scalable, and easier to manage, making them an excellent choice for short-run digital print applications. Having both continuous feed and cutsheet inkjet printers in your arsenal allows you to handle a wide range of print and fulfillment projects effectively.
The Challenge: Lack of Standardization
Despite the incredible capabilities of cutsheet printing, managing media and finishing across various vendors’ devices remains a challenge due to the need for more standardization. Each vendor has its own methods, making job portability and flexibility a struggle. In an ideal world, print jobs should be seamlessly transferable between devices and vendors, irrespective of the print stream.
The Solution: A Vendor-Neutral Approach
One solution to this challenge is adopting a vendor-neutral approach, such as the one offered by Solimar Systems. Our solutions can ingest various methods for managing media and finishing, manipulate them if necessary, and output them to any other method. It can even add finishing to files that never had it or convert these commands into barcodes for offline finishing processes. Solimar ensures that your print jobs remain portable and flexible, regardless of the devices and vendors involved.
In conclusion, the ability to control media and finishing across cutsheet devices revolutionizes the world of digital printing. It empowers printers to create unique, high-quality products efficiently, eliminates manual work, and enhances overall productivity. While challenges exist in achieving seamless interoperability, solutions from Solimar provide a pathway to a more efficient and flexible print production future.
Hello. Welcome to this session about controlling finishing on cut sheet devices. When driving printers, how to control the finishing seems like it should be the least of your concerns, but it can be a major obstacle with the mix of various print streams and print controllers that need proprietary syntax. Many companies don’t realize this until they implement PDF output for their applications, since finishing with PDF output is often not supported. This session will overview concepts related to finishing on printers, print files and ow Solimar more supports them.
Let’s start by clarifying what the finishing on printers topic is about since there are several names for this capability that may not be completely descriptive. For example, subset finishing, page level inline finishing, sheet level finishing or sheet-wise finishing. The context is related to the ability to control the media input, output, and integrated finishing operations such as staple, drill, fold and etc., at a sheet and job level. Media controls allow you to select media from different input trays, and to control where and how pages are ejected from the printer. In traditional digital printing, finishing operations are applied to the entire file as they are typically done at the job level. Page level, or subset finishing can be applied to individual sheets or groups of sheets within a file. For example, if you’re printing a batch run of variable data saddle-stitch books which would each have a different number of sheets. You can use media selection to pull a thick preprinted cover with the die cut window for the address, then pull thinner interior sheets from a different tray. When each book is complete, you can control the inline saddle stitcher. You can even insert colored slip sheets and add a cover letter between books. This allows you to completely automate the production of very creative and interesting products that would otherwise be really hard to produce. Collating documents electronically, jogging output, adding slip sheets, all of this eliminates handwork, reduces errors, and increases productivity. These are key capabilities of cut sheet printing, and page level finishing allows you to take advantage of them.
Control and finishing continues to be important because cut sheet printers remain to be predominant in the high-volume transactional print world. For example, WhatTheyThink has reported that the spotlight for years has been on the highly-productive continuous inkjet feed printers. Their stability and low cost per page has made them the no brainer purchase in many digital print environments. Yet the placement of new CF printers seems to have peaked in 2017. While the placement of cut sheet inkjet printers continues to grow. Many of these cut sheet placements are replacing toner or electro-photographic printers, but with the reduced cost per page, they’re also becoming a cost effective alternative for short run offset printer applications.
Note that continuous feed and cut sheet inkjet are complimentary. Having both in your environment allows you to handle the widest variety of print and fulfillment applications cost effectively. Cut sheet inkjet is particularly interesting and has a stability and lower cost per page of continuous feed, but has a number of compelling advantages over it. Not only does it give you a lot of flexibility to produce different types of products using different, and even mixed stocks, cut sheet printers are less expensive, smaller, and easier to run than continuous feed. This makes them scalable and that you can much more easily add additional units to scale your volumes. Continuous feed is a really big commitment from a money, staffing, and space perspective. Note that I’ve been talking about inkjet, but the functionality we’re talking about here applies to any cut sheet printer.
One of the key capabilities and benefits of cut sheet printing is automated control of paper, from tray pulls to finishing and delivery of final output from the device. Yet the methods for managing this are kind of a mess. There is no real dominant method for managing this across vendors, as each one seems to have a different way to do it, which makes things complicated for all of us. For example, when you create a job, test it and get it to work perfectly on a device and then want to batch jobs together, forget about it, since it’s likely to break the finishing. If you move to another type of printer, you’ll likely need to recreate the files. But if you have an overflow or need to run in a backup location, they better have the same hardware and configuration or you’re out of luck. Many times you feel stuck with device and a vendor for as long as the job lives, because it can be so hard to modify it, or move the jobs from your host applications.
So, in a perfect world, how would it all work? Well, you’d be able to take any job with any kind of finishing, merge it, batch it, slice it, dice it for production optimization, you could send it to any device capable of handling the print and finishing requirements, regardless of the vendor or the print stream. Many composition systems don’t support subset finishing or media handling well, so having the ability to analyze a document, figure out where to add commands where they never existed in legacy jobs is also a key piece of functionality. Converting inline finishing commands to the barcodes used by the offline finishing process is also important, since it gives you the ability to use offline finishing when needed.
The overall goal is to give you the freedom to run all of your jobs, how and where you want. There are a number of ways to handle this today that have matured over the history of digital printing. They all work but are not interoperable, which is what makes this a bit of a mess. There’s proprietary job tickets that work well, since they were created by the printer manufacturer and support the features of the associated device. However, proprietary means they’re not a standard and are typically not created by most composition or post composition software, and they won’t work on other printer vendor’s printers.
PostScript SetPagDevice is the solution for handling this that came from the publishing space, where you can control many inline finishing capabilities. While PostScript is a standard, the specifics of SetPagDevice typically varies between printer controllers, and it was also designed to handle finishing at the job level, not within a file applied to a subset of pages. Many vendors have added proprietary extensions of PostScript just to make this work, but that doesn’t help with the portability. DPM finishing is the standard for controlling finishing with PDF files, which Solimar supports, but you’ve probably never heard of it since it’s largely been ignored by the print community. IPDS is a very comprehensive and standard way of handling page level finishing, but AFP and IPDS are more popular with continuous feed printers than cut sheet applications.
As PDF continues to become the dominant print format for printing, special attention should be given to using JDF and JMF as the preferred print protocol for PDF to support finishing. It not only supports control and finishing, but is a well-documented standard that is widely supported and combined with JMF can provide job status information from the printer. At Solimar, we leverage JDF as part of our Chemistry platform’s output management with SOLitrack and SPDE. SOLitrack has robust support for JDF and JMF that, in addition to control and finishing, enable you to monitor the printer and job status as well as enhance controls such as canceling jobs to the printer from within SOLitrack. This helps to provide centralized insight to keep users informed about what’s happening during printing activities and generate alerts if problems arise. With JDF and JMF, after jobs have run, you can even retrieve ink and media usage for each job, if the printer supports this.
Since controlling finishing with PDF files is one of the main reasons to implement JDF, it’s worth mentioning how you can add finishing information to your PDF files in the first place. In our Chemistry platform, any conversion to PDF will include the finishing information from the original input data into the output PDF file. If you’re starting with PDF or want to modify the existing finishing information, our Rubika solution’s finishing module can help conditionally insert printer finishing commands such as tray selection, plex, stapling, and binding information to the output. This is commonly used with PDF input files, where no finishing information is included in the files, such as outsourced PDF files you need to print or controlling plex and tray calls as needed.
Rubika allows you to conditionally define finishing content when it doesn’t currently exist in a PDF file, and enables you to make changes to existing finishing information within a PDF file. When the finishing is set to duplex, Rubika will automatically pad mailpieces to have odd number page counts with a blank backside, so the next mailpiece starts in a new sheet.
Customers have told us that this was difficult to do with other solutions, but with Rubika, it’s supported automatically by simply setting the finishing to duplex Rubika, SPDE, and Solimar’s overall Chemistry platform incorporate finishing information into PDF files by using annotations or comments in the PDF output. If the input is a print file, the existing finishing is included in the output as annotations that are associated with each sheet in the PDF file, but don’t actually appear on the page display space. With the Chemistry platform, you can ingest almost every type of finishing information, add, remove, or modify it, and then output them to about any other method. This greatly simplifies moving work from one cut sheet device to another, Using Rubika, you can also control finishing by adding barcodes to drive offline finishing processes. The PDF files can be converted to other formats that support finishing, such as PostScript, and when printing PDF files directly to printers, the finishing commands can be controlled with our support for JDF and DPM Finishing, with PDF files natively. It just depends on what the printers support.
Although there’s a JDF standard, different print vendors still use their own syntax to control finishing. With our automated workflow, the JDF job ticket information can be customized for what each printer supports, and if JMF is supported, we can register the printers feedback, such as ink and paper usage to use for reporting.
Sheet level finishing can be a huge differentiator with cut sheet printing. It gives you capabilities that are complementary and impossible in continuous feed printers. There are a lot of different ways to handle finishing, and while they may all work great, they are also in silos of implementation and incompatible with each other. Using SPDE, you can make jobs portable across devices and vendors, but not just converting the print stream, but also converting the sheet level finishing commands as well.
Rubika can be used to add sheet level finishing to the jobs that don’t already have it, or make changes to the existing finishing plans. Because these capabilities are so fragmented in the market. it’s hard to make generalizations about what will or will not work in the wild. If you’re interested in more information. we recommend that you gather information about your devices, printers, and finishing equipment in your specific finishing scenarios, and then work with our support teams to figure out the best way to achieve the finishing result that you were looking for.
Thanks again for your time. Feel free to contact us anytime to learn more about our solutions and how the Chemistry platform can help you.