Benefits and things to consider when choosing a web-to-print solution

Let the photos do the talking. The full photo gallery of sights and highlights from Graph Expo 2010.

If you have invested in a fully automated web-to-print solution with financial database, congratulations, all the points in this article should be covered by your system. If your web-to-print solution is more of an online order and delivery system, you will need to help out your manufacturing system.

The following items need to be part of a web-to-print solution for it to succeed and profit.

Print World: The World of Shorter-Run Printing is the biggest show of its kind in North America. Especially with the expanding implementation of digital presses, the shorter-run market is rapidly growing. In 2008, the show welcomed nearly 10,000 attendees. This year, from November 20-22, Print World will be presented at the Direct Energy Centre in downtown Toronto with over 125,000 square feet of exhibition space.

There are many variables to consider in the area of proofing and, unfortunately, much of it gets forgotten in the busy world of printing. Let's look at the options and the areas of concern.

This year’s Graph Expo show at McCormick Place in Chicago promises “four days of comparison shopping, networking, live equipment demonstrations, seminars and critical decision making.” The show floor will be divided tinto four main sections: prepress, press & converting, wide-format, and mailing & fulfillment. To be held from October 3-6, 2010, Graph Expo is the year’s largest display of “live” running equipment in the Americas. With the exception of a few well-known press manufacturers, the show’s exhibitor attendance is looking exciting this year. More than 450 companies are scheduled to show off their stuff in Chicago this year – including most of the “big guys.”

Using automation to save money and increase capacity is quickly becoming the norm in the graphic arts industry. Automatic preflight and optimization software for customer supplied PDFs reduces the amount of hands-on work in the prepress department.

A previous article talked about PDFs received from an online source and how parts of the production process could be automated. Some items that are not so easy to automatically fix can have automation assist to reduce the manual work. Adjusting bleed and page size in a PDF is one example.