Variable Data Printing
One of the more Important tasks performed by high-volume printers is variable data printing. While traditional offset printing presses and high-volume copters are quite good at producing long runs of a single page or document where the information stays the same, they are not well suited for producing runs where each page of a document varies slightly from set to set. When high-volume printers are combined with Variable Data Software, they have the ability to print variations on each page throughout the document.
Indeed, variable data printing can be thought of as a form of on demand printing where all the pages are similar but not identical. If you’ve ever used the mail-merge function in a word processing program, you’ve done variable data printing. But that’s just the start of what can be a very complex printing application.
Variability in printing has existed for a long time. Consider your telephone bill. Each bill is imprinted with customer data using a standard format on a preprinted form. The key is getting the right data printed on the right invoice. Similarly, advertisers have known for a long time how to individualize mailing labels and marketing cover letters so that they are addressed to a specific customer.
The use of variable information, what we’ll call “personalization” has been the province of back-office operations usually connected to a mainframe or minicomputer. The trick in this type of printing has been formatting and feeding data taken from large databases to a print engine without losing any speed.
If you are interested in variable data printing, you can expect the vendor to provide the software that makes the conversion and places the inserted text in the right position. You may be lucky enough to get off-the-shelf software, but it’s likely the software will have to be customized to meet your requirements. Vendors such as IBM, OCE, and Xerox are dearly oriented toward this kind of back-office work.
With personalization, only a small amount of data on each page changes — think of it as high-volume but low-complexity. An example would be companies that use preprinted forms and add only a small amount of data on each form. Keep in mind that if your printing needs involve direct mail marketing, you may want to have a machine that can handle a wide variety of preprinted materials.
The second kind of printing — what we’ll call “customization” — involves more than just a few lines of text. This kind of printing can require the insertion of text, graphics, and even barcode. It is a far more complicated process because, unlike the way regular printing is done, by rasterizing pages and images just as they are going to print, high-volume printers operate at such high speeds that this is simply not feasible.
Let's say that you are a one-to-one direct marketing firm. You’ve canvassed prospective buyers to see what kind of product they might buy, and you want to follow up with a customized brochure with text and images that match their interests. The time it would take to rasterize each individual photo during the printing process would slow printing down far below the rated speed of the machine. For that reason, there are software solutions available that specialize in rasterizing files in advance and feeding them rapidly to the printer. An example of this is Xerox’s VIPP (Variable Data Intelligent PostScript PrintWare), which is an add-on to PostScript.
The third form of variable data printing is “document customization.” This kind of printing involves a completely new arrangement of pages for each document.
A typical example would be an Insurance companies policy information or booklet that 1 customized to each customer’s individual policy. The pages already exist for all the various policy types, but the precise pages a person receives is based on a range of parameters existing in a customer database.
All of the different variable data type go trend in hand with a direct marketing concept called data mining.” This involves extracting data from one or two databases that are often in Incompatible formats and bringing the information together for printing, whether by preprocessing or In real time.
Variable data printing, at least in its higher level, is taking its time in having a dramatic impact on the market. The problems aren’t primarily technological; it’s usually an issue of project management. Coordinating marketing, production, programming, and design to produce a successful variable data piece is no easy task. And the software tools only get you so far. Be aware that buying a machine will not make you into an instant variable data publisher.
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