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

The fundamental problem you are describing is a common one and is experienced by many users under a lot of circumstances. Often when we connect to services on the Internet, we connect to them by entering a name, whether it's a website, or sending e-mail or an app that posts our thoughts to Twitter. It seems to be magical somehow, but let me see if I can lift the curtain and explain the mystery.

Graph Expo just wrapped up in Chicago, and after walking around the show and speaking to customers, I've come to the conclusion that the need for print in the digital age is alive and well and innovating itself at a staggering rate. Customers were here in big numbers looking for new techniques and technologies that would continue to push the limits of what they can do with ink on paper, plastic, metal, wood, glass and many other substrates.

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.

How has photo booth technology changed?

In this issue, we would like to try a unique approach to summarizing Graph Expo for you. I hope the previous month's column gave you a good sense of the types of technologies to be showcased. This month, we're giving you a taste of what the show actually looked like – a bit more visual. If you missed the show, perhaps you will feel you attended!

TransPromo printing has received a fair amount of attention in the past few years, and continues to be promoted by vendors and industry consultants as an excellent growth opportunity for printers in times of diminishing revenues. However, it seems that while opportunity is knocking for both printers and marketers, not many are answering the call just yet.

The PDF alone does not have any features for printing a number of copies, but there are many ways to get multiple copies or page count information into RIPs, including older ones. Here are some examples of automation strategies for a number of different configurations:

The disk space on my Mac is almost full and I'd like to store our family photos on an external drive and store the family videos from my second MacBook on the storage device as well. How can we move the files if we get an external drive or Mac Mini Server?