Nov 10, 2003
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
When you work in an HVCO environment you gain an appreciation for how difficult simple tasks become when there is a diversity of file formats, procedures, workflows, and perceptions. Simple tasks like sharing a graphic file with a colleague in another area of the company can become an overwhelming challenge if your part of the organization is mainframe based using AFP or Xerox files and their part of the company is Mac based using source files in Adobe Illustrator. Even ensuring the availability of a specific typeface throughout the enterprise can become an unforeseen technical challenge.
If you have faced the challenge you may have found yourself mumbling under your breath about the lack of standards. If you have been in the industry long enough you may actually moan a bit about the failure of the SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) initiatives of the 1980s to materialize as consistent standards for graphics, fonts, and print file formats. And, if you are a relative newcomer to the industry, you may be trying to figure out if there is any hope at all of bringing together such a wide range of file formats into some standard.
The good news is that there are standards emerging in our industry and in the industry verticals that the HVCO industry supports that may have the strength of commitment behind them that provides light at the end of the tunnel. The market is still not completely convinced that these emerging standards are the panacea, but there is a passionate group of people who are working to convince us to trust them, to believe, and to participate as the standards are refined and implemented.
One of the groups is PODi, which has a variety of missions related to promoting digital printing. Their significant task at hand is the management of the activities surrounding the Personalized Print Markup Language, PPML. The language, if widely accepted, promoted, and implemented would allow creators of personalized documents requiring monochrome or color output to produce files that would be reliably rendered by output device owners. How is this new? Can?t we do that today? The key here is reliability.
The promise of PPML is that the vendors of today?s document composition software products would allow their customers to produce files in their current output formats, but also in PPML. Those PPML files could be sent to vendors who were equipped to read them and render them reliably, regardless of what their actual hardware environment was, within the limits of that hardware. For example, if a document owner wanted color output, they would be able to create their document and have it include the required specifications so that any PPML compatible environment that was color-capable would produce identical output.
Sound like a tall promise? In many ways it is because it relies on cooperation among both the document composition vendors and the output vendors, as well as among those in each group. IN PODi terminology the document composition vendors are Producers while the output environment owners, usually print devices, but sometimes workflow environments, are Consumers. Come back next time and we?ll talk more about what PODi offers and how you might benefit from adopting PPML. If this is valuable, drop us a line at pm@outputlinks.com!