We have walked a long way since Gutenberg created the first printing press around 1439, using the technology available those days. Looking with today’s eyes, the evolution then was sort of slow, until the rotary press was invented in 1843 and the off-set printing in 1875. With the advent of the computer era appeared the need to have printing devices for those systems. The IBM 1403 was then introduced in 1959 and under different covers and names the same technology was used for many years, becoming probably the printing device with the longest period of active production.
The introduction of laser printing in the market, in the form of the IBM 3800 and the Xerox 9700, was the way the photocopy technology introduced by Xerox in 1959 became a computer output device. Later in 1984, Apple was able to produce high quality outputs by using, at that time, the newly Postscript language, developed by Adobe and created the laser desktop printing with the device called LaserWriter.
Many new machines have been and continue to be developed and nowadays Inkjet printing, originally used only in small desktop printers, has become the output technology that allows printing at speeds that surpass 1,000 pages per minute.
Since the introduction of the desktop computer, in the form of Apple devices, desktop publishing has become a highly important document technology line, because it has allowed the achievement of high-quality printing using the power of computers, creating images that have evolved from 300 dots per inch to densities that make it completely impossible for the human eyes to perceive them in full detail. Plotters of different brands are able today to print pictures that we could not even have imagined as digitally printed not long ago.
Book publishing, in limited quantities, is also a very convenient alternative to traditional press and also the printing of mail advertising is done mainly with digital printing, adding the possibility of personalizing them for every single user. The breakpoint for digital from traditional printing is continuously evolving, in favor of digital making it harder and harder for traditional printing manufacturers to maintain their market share.
Digital printing is heavily used also for marketing materials, static letters, etc. However, there is an area that continues to have a significant presence in the market, called “variable data” printing. Computer output in the form of variable barcodes, flexible and dynamic document creation as contracts and legal documents, as well as Bank and insurance documents that must include a transactional piece of information together with legal clauses, are an important requirement for large organizations. Also, millions of documents are being printed every month in many countries to report account statements, public services information and bills.
The need to have variable documents using the available APA (All Points Addressable) document technology, provided by digital printing, created the need for composition software that made it possible to mix the design information (lines, rectangles, pictures, type fonts, etc.) with the composition logic.
The first attempt to produce variable document was made with the introduction of IBM’s AFP (Advanced Functions Printing) software architecture in the late 70’s. Originally the IBM 3800 used a sort of negative film layer to produce graphics, especially the form templates. AFP technology is still in use, but the real leap ahead happened when PC based, WYSIWYG, composition software became available. Important evolution has gone through this type of software, and today you can find very expensive software that are not available to every user and only large corporations can afford them. Those are especially oriented to mass production of documents but other software, like DocPath’s document software, have been oriented towards network distribution, so they produce much lighter documents that also provide very flexible ways to define the composition logic of variable/dynamic documents.
The problem that document software faced was to make such powerful software, capable of building highly dynamic document, required the user to program that logic. Some of those programming tasks can be extremely complex, using a logic that in reality should not be called that way. DocPath offered a sort of “C” language subset that allowed total flexibility but put on the user’s shoulders the responsibility to undergo, sometimes, extensive programming.
These days, users expect another kind of document software technology. Nobody should be creating documents using programming languages, but still many people think that they can do everything using their programming skills. Such approach is totally unproductive. Do you imagine people “painting” a document using Java, C# or JavaScritpt? Yes, Javascript! Some document software products still only offer that option. The worst part is, the more open the tool is, the more skills are needed, and the possibility of mistakes increases exponentially. In the past, creating a complex dynamic document could take weeks. Yes, weeks of heavy programming and weeks of testing. All possibilities had to be programmed and tested before entering the final steps and production.
DocPath decided that the document composition problem needed to be solved. That complexity should be taken care of by the document software product developers and not business users. That is why DocPath’s document solutions are introducing a whole new way to define the document composition logic, and at the same timekeeping it fully compatible with the previous versions of products. This is a key factor, because no customer should be disrupted from their normal operation and no form template or application should need to be modified.
Defining the composition logic is now been done with a fully graphical, drag and drop approach. The user defines the sequence and use of any document element, linking all needed elements in the correct sequence and defining basic decision logic through the use of menus. This “simple statement” implies thousand hours of programming and testing by the DocPath’s document software developers but means that the user is able to enjoy a much more advanced software.
In the past, calculations were done mainly through programming, but today’s users would not accept that. For that reason, the new DocPath software includes a full set of math and logic operations that only need to be defined and the code needed for processing will be dynamically handled directly by the Designer tool. That means that calculation routines that were needed before are being now substituted by a simple definition selected from a menu.
The focus is on delivering document software that enhances the user’s capabilities to create complex documents, without the hassle of difficult programming. The user’s brain can now be used for much more business-oriented objectives that will help them in creating more flexible and professional. Not less important is the fact that now no programming skills are needed and, therefore, the focus can be put more on graphics designers and business manager, but and not in programmers for designing sophisticated business documents.
New document software technology should make special emphasis on delivering powerful tools combined with simplicity. Complexity should be handled “under the covers” and let the user enjoy a document design product that is easy to use and very versatile at the same time.
Of course, not only printed documents benefit from all these improvements. Today many documents are never printed, because they are produced in digital formats and they remain as such during all their operating life. With DocPath’s document software technology generating or printing and standard format is seamlessly easy.
J.C. Olivares
Business Development Mgr. at DocPath Corp.