PDF Optimization Benefits Way Beyond Just Print. Experts Share Secrets
Creating and delivering communications is critical for brands and businesses. However, the production of these communications continues to change. One of the major changes Pat and Drew have discussed in the SolimarSecrets video series is the continued adoption of the PDF file format as a standard. The continued and widespread uptake of PDF drives the need for better methods for creating, handling, optimizing, and storing as part of communications creation and delivery processes. PDF optimization is crucial for businesses today and they are leveraging it for more than print production.
Join Drew Sprague, President of Solimar Systems and Pat McGrew, Managing Director of McGrewGroup, in our next SolimarSecrets ROI Boost video. They discuss PDF optimization and how Solimar is seeing customer success with our industry-changing and award-winning ReadyPDF® Prepress Server™. Pat asks Drew about the surprising use of PDF optimization revealed by customer case studies, especially for electronically delivered content (a.k.a. e-delivery).
Customer preference, technology, and the global economy are driving the future of communications design, production and delivery. Drew shares how content creation and production have changed over time and the impact that has had on the processes or workflow needed to deliver it to end recipients. By adding more flexible, configurable, and manageable solutions that are fully supported, communication providers benefit from lower IT and production costs, faster routes to market, and the opportunity to optimize and grow their book of business.
Missed an earlier video in the ROI Boost group? Be sure to look at our SolimarSecrets page for a full listing of topics. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we would love to start your journey and help you find ChemistryNOW.
So, if you look at some of the new things that Solimar has brought to market. One of my favorite is your PDF optimization tool. And that’s my personal bias because I’ve seen so many RIPs stop dead when bad PDF gets passed to them that anything that makes that better just has my heart. But one of the funny things that I didn’t realize was how many of your customers use it for more than print optimization. So, you’ve managed to build a tool that makes their archives better, makes their networks run faster, as well as making their RIPs run faster. How did you know you had to do that?
Well, you know, we’ve been into PDF for such a long time and you know, in the early years it wasn’t so critical, but it’s this mass of movement of PDF. We’re having to aggregate all this content that has really made it a lot more important to do so. You know, in a decade or two ago, people tended to deal strictly with large batches and the quality of the PDF was, I think, somewhat more controllable, actually. But now less so. And in particular the tools that people are pulling out of the ether to create PDF seem to be stuck in years past while they’re trying to implement today’s workflows. And so, it’s there’s a bit of a the issue I think is that people aren’t using the right tools often to create the PDF for the workflow that they intend. And so yeah, it’s become more of a recent need to deal with this optimization in the way that we are. Applying it to primarily the high-volume space, right? So, it is intended to implement automation around optimization.
We’ve heard some of your customers talk about how like it saves them hours and hours, if not like a whole eight-hour shift of time because the size of the file, the optimized nature of the file moves through their systems faster, which to me just speaks to how bad a lot of the PDF that’s getting created really is.
Well, we try very hard to make a flexible product. Of course, you know, there’s always going to be challenges with new problems that you’ve never seen that are just basically garbage input problems. And, what we try to do there is help the users trap those so that they don’t confound the rest of the workflow and, you know, mess up their SLAs and stuff like that so they can trap those and then have a meaningful conversation with whoever generated it to try to get it resolved there.
Sometimes that’s the hardest part, is having that other piece of the conversation. Hi, you sent me really bad PDF. Let us help you fix that.
Right. It is because sometimes people are just a little too anxious to get business.