For Position Only: The Potential of Personalized Printing
“Personalized Print Markup Language”, or PPML: If you’re like me, the thought of one more “ML” acronym might be enough to send you running for a hill so high and so remote that publishing technology will never find you. PPML is becoming an accepted standard that allows variable-data digital short-run printing-another technology that may also put you off. But it’s worth taking a deep breath, staying put, and considering what PPML brings to the print production table. You might be surprised by what it can do for you.
PPML Print Power
PPML is indeed based on XML. First announced at Drupa 2000, PPML is a print language with an open architecture that provides a standard way to reuse images in print production. Instead of pages being the smallest objects that the language recognizes, PPML can define and recognize individual objects on a page and print them independently.
So say you’re producing a car brochure and you want your West Coast audience to see a photo of a car with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, your East Coast audience to see the same car with a backdrop of New England autumn foliage, and your Texas audience to see a monster pickup truck kicking up a spume of dust off-road. With PPML you don’t have to create three different pages with three different photos, and then store, transmit, and rasterize each of those versions consecutively. Page components — in this case, the various photos — can be sent to the printer independently and merged with the layout when it’s printed.
The result is not only three targeted, eye-catching brochures but also a significant reduction in the amount of data stored and transmitted, which means significantly less time required to process and print documents. Furthermore, depending on how PPML is used to create personalized print pieces, it can reduce postage costs and dramatically increase response rates for direct mail. And here’s a blatant plug for my favorite technology, Adobe PDF: a subset of the PPML spec, PPML/VDX, allows variable content (such as the photos) to be in PDF format, and for the whole final shebang to rasterized from a PDF file.
Pieces of the PPML Puzzle
While the standard is barely two years old, version 2.0 was already approved this past spring. This new version broadens the capabilities of the language by adding support for industry-standard JDF job tickets. As a result, you can specify such features as duplexing, finishing, and paper selection without knowing what device will actually be used to print your job. In addition, the spec improves cross-platform file transfer, with rules regarding file naming and directory structures that are designed to ensure smooth workflows and simplified procedures.
Of course, PPML doesn’t work in a vacuum, and happily several other key pieces of the variable data puzzle are in place. The first, of course, is digital presses. As I wrote last month, short-run digital presses have tremendous speed and produce high-quality four-color output these days. And many key vendors — of both hardware and software — have signed onto the PPML bandwagon, including EFI, Pageflex, Xeikon, HP, Banta, and others. As a result, it’s becoming easier and easier to find a mix of creation tools and output devices that will work for many different types of workflows.
The problem with personalized printing, which has been hovering in the wings of the print publishing industry for a decade now even though PPML has only been around for two years, isn’t with the technology. No, the technology is there, in place, ready to roll. We’re the ones holding it back.
Personalizing PPML
I’ve been harping on this all summer: Creative professionals are in a rut. We’re not being adventurous with technology like we used to be; we’re stuck in our ways, complacent. We were distracted by the Web for a while, and now the sluggish economy makes a great excuse for not spending the money that it inevitably takes to make money.
But the fact is, it’s more important than ever that we find ways to differentiate ourselves and our print designs, to stand out from the competition, and to justify our clients’ investment in our services. And personalized printing is a way to do this.
Now, I’m not as naïve as some of you may think. I can feel you itching to post a response of “I disagree” to this column. Let me try to preempt a few critiques by saying that I know personalized printing is not an easy task: The technology isn’t perfect and doing it successfully requires more than compositing three pretty pictures of cars with regional backdrops in Photoshop. One of the biggest challenges that must be addressed with personalized print is its reliance on databases. Creating and managing a usable database for personalized printing takes a special set of skills that designers haven’t necessarily been trained in. Indeed, training is crucial not only for the database aspect of personalized printing, but also for marketing (conceptualizing the entire job and defining measurable goals) and for production (streaming the flow of information from creative applications to the digital press).
Success Stories
Hear me clearly now: I’m not trying to make a case here for how printers can be profitable by offering digital printing services or variable-data printing services. That’s an entirely different topic. But I am saying that if you look around, you’ll find printers that can help you if you want to tackle a personalized print project, and you’ll also find resources to get trained on tools you need.
A good place to start, for inspiration and resources, is the Digital Printing initiative’s Web site, www.PODi.org. You’ll find lots of successful case studies, recommendations for best practices, and more. Good luck, and let me know how it works out for you.
Read more by Anita Dennis.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on July 18, 2002
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