New PODi Report Confirms PPML Interoperability by Leading Digital Print Vendors

ROCHESTER, NY—January 28, 2008—PODi, the Digital Printing Initiative, today announced the release of the second PPML Interoperability Report. PPML (the Personalized Print Markup Language) facilitates creating personalized high-volume print campaigns by service providers, enabling meaningful one-to-one “conversations” for their customers. This new report provides detailed results of interoperability testing across the products of ten leading printing device vendors using PODi’s PPML Consumer Test Suite. The report provides the marketplace with a valuable resource for developing and implementing PPML-based workflows that will perform reliably across multiple brands of printing devices.

Test results demonstrate the high level of interest and cooperation among vendors in pursuit of proven standards. The report documents PPML interoperability across leading print devices from Xerox and Xeikon, HP Indigo, and the EFI Fiery-driven devices from: Canon, Fuji Xerox, IKON, Kodak Versamark, Konica Minolta, Oce, Ricoh, and Xerox.

Interoperability is the ability of printing systems from a number of manufacturers to produce, consume and print a properly configured PPML data stream without device-dependent customization. A “PPML Producer” is a software program that generates a PPML dataset (file), identifying each static, variable & re-usable object within. An image to be printed multiple times need only appear once in the PPML dataset. A “PPML Consumer” is a digital printing device that can consume the PPML dataset and print the results at much higher speed than alternatives.

PODi test suites make it easier for vendors and developers to successfully design PPML compatibility into their products. Service providers are assured of the integrity and openness of their PPML-driven workflow. In addition to commercial products that currently produce PPML for variable data printing, there are a significant number of print service providers that develop their own unique PPML-based solutions. Users find that when printing variable data, PPML’s caching of re-usable elements delivers up to 20X improvement in print speed versus simply printing a stream of static PDF or Postscript pages.