PODi Sees Continued Strong Growth for Digital Printing, Touts VDP Standard
ROCHESTER, NY—Sept. 28, 2011—PODi, the Digital Printing Initiative, reports that digitally printed page volumes in North America have increased substantially every year since 2003, and are projected to grow to nearly 130 billion pages per year by 2015.
PODi President Rab Govil says, “Digital printing has a solid record of reliable growth, even through the recession. From 6.1 billion color digital pages printed in 2003 to 46.1 billion pages printed in 2010, digital printing has experienced seven consecutive years of growth. Our research shows that the big drivers of growth for at least the next decade will be direct mail, transpromo and marketing collateral.”
As part of its continuing mission to advance the digital printing industry and the world of digital short-run, on-demand and variable-data printing (VDP), PODi supports key standards.
“PODi has always promoted standards-based interoperability and workflows that advance production printing and develop new markets for digital print,” notes Govil. “That work has led to the development of PPML, which is now the leading VDP language in the commercial print segments. We have now added PDF/VT support to help print service providers who want to have an end-to-end PDF workflow that includes variable data.”
The merits of PDF/VT were recognized by the Printing Industries of American (PIA), which honored the format with a 2011 InterTech Technology Award. In summary, PDF/VT offers the following features:
- Support for the latest PDF imaging model, which can accurately render transparencies.
- Existing tools can pre-flight and modify PDF/X4 and PDF/X5 files and can therefore be used for PDF/VT files.
- The free Acrobat Reader can be used to preview and soft-proof PDF/VT files.
- The preview/soft-proof/print file is one and the same so there are no discrepancies between what the customer sees and what gets printed.
- Support for blind job exchange.
- Distiller in combination with pdfmark can be used to convert optimized PostScript to PDF/VT (providing a simple migration path).
The established PPML (Personalized Print Markup Language) standard has been significantly enhanced with the recent release of PPML 3.0. In addition to supporting transparency, PPML 3.0 also supports transparency between layers. PPML supports native formats including EPS, jpg, tiff, PDF. It also offers high performance in streaming applications. The PPML standard can be downloaded at www.podi.org.
About PODi
PODi is a vendor neutral industry initiative with hundreds of member companies, including Executive Board members EFI, HP, Pitney Bowes and Xerox. The organization’s goal is to drive demand for marketing applications powered by digital print & help members build successful digital print businesses. Membership in PODi is open to companies and organizations involved in digital printing.
Source: PODi.