Greg Cholmondeley, Principal Analyst in Keypoint Intelligence’s Production Group, talks to Andrew Bailes-Collins, Head of Product Management at Ultimate TechnoGraphics, about the company’s latest development in variable data print file cleanup, optimization, and prep for the digital front end.
GC: You have a little bit of an announcement?
ABC: We did, BetterPDF
GC: How was the reaction up untill today?
ABC: Phenomenal! It’s been amazing! We thought it would be good, and we are only at day two at Hunkeler Innovationdays of course. We announced it before in a press release and the reaction has been incredible. It’s a module for our flagship version, Ultimate Impostrip Scalable. It’s an optional module and it’s been quite incredible. When we start talking to customers about problems with VDP files, everyone has got a story, everyone has a problem file they want to talk about so yes, it really looks like we really hit a sweetspot. Looking forward to following up after the show and also releasing the product of course. It’s only in Beta at the moment.
GC: So it’s going to be out the second quarter?
ABC: It’s going to be out second quarter yes. We are Beta testing at the moment. We don’t want rush these things and make sure it’s all right before it goes out. The value proposition and the reaction to what we’re planning and what we’ve shown has been absolutely incredible.
GC: So just to be clear on what it does, it will fix errors…
ABC: Oh yeah, well it doesn’t so much fix errors, it’s not preflight. You can’t preflight a 250.000 page PDF. Having done 20 years of that, I know that that is not possible. We have a new approach to optimize the file, to make it perform better. We optimize it, re-engineer it, as we say, by outputting a new file, then impose it, and deliver it to the DFE. So, it’s prepared for our software, but also for the device it’s going to be imaged on, to make the device perform better, to make the DFE perform better. You can then run the device with optimum speed and it doesn’t have to slow down because the file is causing you issues while trying to process it.
GC: So it’s kinda like a carwash for PDF? Whatever you put in comes out the other side, but cleaner 🙂
ABC: It’s a little bit more technical like that. But yeah, you got the concept 🙂
GC: You are not changing it.
ABC: We are definately not touching the content, we are not interested in text, graphics, images and things like that. It’s the underlying PDF structure that is the result of … I am going to sound professional, but various PDF libraries and things like that that you get with these large VDP high pagination jobs.
PDF specification is over 1000 pages and it’s very feature rich, things that have nothing to do with print, but these files get delivered to our customers and they have to make them work. They have to hit deadlines, SLA’s and mailing dates and this is a new tool for their armory to help them achieve that.
It looks like we have a very nice product on our hands. Which as product manger is exactly what you are looking for.
Very exciting.
You can watch the full interview here
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