Volunteers Make EDSF REPORT Possible
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009By Brenda Kai, executive director, EDSF “I want to thank and pay tribute to all of our volunteers – those dedicated people who believe in all work and no pay”. –Robert Orben, humorist, writer and editor Without our volunteers, who give selflessly of their time and expertise, EDSF — the international non-profit organization dedicated to…
The Season of Giving
Monday, December 7th, 2009By Brenda Kai, executive director, EDSF There is a popular holiday story in which a character named Scrooge is visited by three ghosts. Scrooge asks one of the ghosts, “Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?” Can we change the future? A certain…
Make a Difference with EDSF Industry Scholarships
Friday, December 4th, 2009By Brenda Kai, executive director, EDSF The future is bright for students studying and preparing for careers in the document management and graphic communications industry, and EDSF scholarships are making a big difference. EDSF is the international non-profit organization dedicated to the document management and graphic communications industries, and its scholarship program is benefiting hundreds…
EDSF Introduces New Adopt-a-Scholar Program
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009By Brenda Kai, executive director, EDSF We are pleased to announce a new program designed to support EDSF scholarships. Effective today, donations of any size can be made directly into the EDSF Adopt-a-Scholar program. When the scholarships are awarded in July 2010, each donor participating in the program will receive: a thank you letter from…
NASCAR Drivers Are Not the Only Ones Who Need Sponsors
Monday, November 30th, 2009By Brenda Kai, EDSF executive director If you have ever been to a NASCAR race or watched one on TV, it seems that nothing in NASCAR is without a sponsor. Cars are covered in logos and stickers, drivers have patches from shoulder to shoulder, and every race is brought to you by one company or…
VDP Technical Reading List
Monday, September 14th, 2009By Nicholas Barzelay One of the problems in training for VDP is the issue of not providing an adequate understanding of the fundamental technologies involved. In football for example, a player needs to know how to run, block, and tackle before being able to adequately perform play patterns. In the military there is a step…
Data Processing Skills for VDP
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009By Nicholas Barzelay Basic data processing for VDP is concerned with storage and retrieval, manipulating data structures and content, and program logic expressed in an input-process-output paradigm. This requires fundamental programming and data management skills. Understanding database is helpful for initial data acquisition and front-end data preparation. Basic file manipulation skills – read a file…
Programming Languages for VDP
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009By Nicholas Barzelay The question, “What is the best programming language for VDP?” seems to be a persistently unanswered issue for those developing or contemplating VDP development. There are very many programming languages these days. Some are more suitable for handling textual and numeric data than others. This is one consideration, but beyond functionality, execution…
XML Processing for VDP
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009By Nicholas Barzelay Simple File Structure A file is composed of records, which may or may not beuniquely identified with a record key. Records may also be identified by a physical mechanism in the filecalled an inter-record gap (IRG). A program reads a record until it comes to a new key or the IRG. At…
Insights on a Desktop DBMS for VDP
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009This is part 2 of a series exploring the current state of variable data printing. Part 1, Insights on VDP By Nicholas Barzelay Key Features The key feature of a desktop database is the capability to see both the structure of the data and the data itself. This view is like a spreadsheet, but provides…
Examination of Variable Data Printing (Part 1)
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009Editor’s Note Nicholas Barzelay is a recent graduate of RIT School of Print Media’s graduate program. Mr. Barzelay’s research area was variable data printing. He is the co-author of Upstream Database and Digital Asset Management in Variable Data Printing (Executive Summary available here). Mr. Barzelay is working on two books on the subjects of data…
New “LaserSonic” method of digital printing
Monday, June 15th, 2009It is rare that new printing methods are introduced, but it happened last week. The announcement came in the form of a press release that described a joint venture between MDC Max Daetwyler, the Swiss firm that pioneered the first successful laser gravure system, and Interprint GmbH, the German-based printer of fabrics, carpets, and wood…
Publishing less of More
Monday, June 8th, 2009In a session at the recent Book Business Conference, attended mostly by book publishers, self publishers were derided as being “those people who try to bypass the people in this room”, i.e., the book publishers. It is more likely that self-publishers are those people who were bypassed by the people in that room. Self-publishing is…
Baker & Taylor (with Donnelley’s help) takes on LightningSource
Thursday, June 4th, 2009Baker & Taylor, Ingram’s main competitor in book distribution, has announced a book-on-demand operation of its own, scheduled to launch in September. I talked to a B&T spokesperson, who made it clear that like LightningSource (which is owned by Ingram), the B&T service is designed for true run-length-of-one POD book printing. The actual production will…
It’s time to draw the line between 1:1 and TransPromo
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009Heidi Tolliver-Nigro noted in a recent posting that 1:1 print jobs are rarely repeated. Let’s think about that for a minute. First, what do we mean by 1:1?? Name and address with a customer loyalty coupon? Some real estate post card application? Those are nice, but they have little or nothing to do with the…
