Product Reviews

Q

Can you recommend any variable data printing (VDP) programs that are simple and inexpensive? Most of the ones I have seen are very complicated and pricey. We want to dip our toes into personalisation of greetings cards. Martin, via the Help Line forum at printweek.com

Many thanks to 'Get Carter' from the PrintWeek online community who posted a link to a useful resource on Adobe's website listing various supplier of VDP apps and plug-ins. I've combined that list with some other information sources to come up with quite a long list of possibilities. You'll need to do a bit of digging to see what fits your requirements viz price and ease-of-use, perhaps a good starting place would be the plug-ins and extensions. Also one useful suggestion: check with your RIP or workflow vendor because you might have easy access to something usable within those systems. Datalogics (www.datalogics.com); Design Merge (www.designmerge.com); Direct Smile (www.directsmile.de); EFI (www.efi.com); Elixir Technologies (www.elixir.com); EM Software (emsoftware.com); EMC Document Sciences (www.docscience.com); Esko Artwork (www.esko.com); Exstream Software (www.exstream.com); Factotum Media (www.factotum.nl); Finite Matters (www.patternstream.com); GMC (www.gmc.net); HP (Smartstream Designer) (www.hp.com); Kodak (Darwin) (www.graphics.kodak.com); L2 Fuse (www.l2solutions.com); Lexigraph PDFexpress (www.lexigraph.com); Marketing Unity (www.marketingunity.com); Objectif Lune (www.objectiflune.com); Pageflex (www.bitstream.com);Printable Technologies (www.printable.com); PrintSoft (www.printsoft.com); ROI Distribution (www.roidistribution.com); Sefas Innovation (www.sefas.com); XChange International (www.xchangeuk.com); Xerox FreeFlow (www.xerox.com); XMPie (www.xmpie.com).