XMPie vs EngageIT and VDP

[lakesean]

I'm helping my company upgrade several pieces of hardware and software to expand our printing capabilities especially when it come to VDP.  Right now we're mostly relying on Indesign's Data Merge function to do this. The problem is unlike Word's Data Merge function, in Indesign there's no way to directly print from the file to the printer. Instead you either have to export the file to PDF and print the PDF, or you have to create a giant Merged Document and print that. This is okay for a few hundred records but as the record count goes up the more the program bogs down. Indesign slows to a crawl around the 2,000 page mark. My company is considering upgrading our Xerox c70 to a Konica c1060 and we would like to take some of the workload off of our continuous form printer which is running an out of date version of Printnet. I've done some research into XMPie for our current Xerox and found that whlie it's export function was a little more robust than Indesign's our printer couldn't handle anything other than the basic PDF. On top of that XMPie wanted to sell us a $30,000 server to help with the export. With the upgrade to the Konica we should be able to handle things like PDF/VT and Postsript, can anyone tell me what EngageIT can do over XMPie and Indesign's  Data Merge Functions? Any hints as to the pricing would be nice too.

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

When it comes to VDP, InDesign's native data merge function really doesn't cut it for any reasonable size, graphically complex job. Exporting PDF from that native data merge is not only very slow, but yields highly pessimized PDF (opposite of optimized?). And you never, repeat never should attempt such jobs printing directly from InDesign. (Since InDesign 1.0, I've never printed directly from InDesign; I always export PDF and print from the PDF file after visually looking it over.

You definitely want to do VDP via PDF/VT-1 (an ISO VDP printing standard layered over PDF/X-4 with live transparency and ICC color management). Solutions such as so-called “optimized” PostScript or “optimized” PDF often are proprietary to particular printer models or vendors and are not nearly as efficient as properly generated PDF/VT. Solutions such as PPML are previous generation standards that do internal conversions to PostScript. And be very wary of printer vendor-specific solutions that trap you into use of a particular vendor's hardware.

I personally do have experience with the XMPie products. Although they may want to sell you a $30,000 server-based solution, the much less expensive (sorry I don't have pricing) individual workstation-based XMPie UDirect product works as a plug-in to desktop InDesign and generates very efficient PDF/VT-1 with exceptional speed. The official PDF/VT-1 test files with hundreds of thousands of pages, posted on the PDF Association's website, were created using this XMPie product and have been shown to keep the fastest digital printers and with DFEs supporting PDF/VT-1 running at full speed.

          - Dov