Editor development in the
Web2Print area?

Last year was a very exciting year for us in the field of editor development. The expansion of our customer base has given us the opportunity to gain interesting insights into new sectors and to gain additional experience in the field of 3D visualization through the visions of our customers.

For the first version of our web-to-print editors, Adobe's Flash platform was the tool of choice for us. The decisive factor was the possibility to realize editing functions, such as text or image manipulation, directly in the browser and to implement cross-browser development relatively easily. Native developments in the browser using HTML & JavaScript were feasible in principle at that time, but the HTML standard did not yet meet our high requirements for developing a correspondingly powerful editor.

However, the introduction of mobile devices, such as the iPhone and later the iPad from Apple, heralded the gradual extinction of Flash technology. Some of the reasons for this incipient development were the poorer performance on tablets and smartphones as well as the comprehensive exclusion of Flash on all mobile devices from Apple. We therefore decided to discontinue the previous editor development based on Flash and switch completely to HTML5. Our focus was now primarily on implementing all the functions available in Flash using HTML and JavaScript and adapting them to the new development environment. In addition to taking into account the numerous browsers, our developers also had to deal with the changeover from ActionScript (Flash) to JavaScript at the beginning. However, thanks to new approaches, overcoming these natural hurdles was ultimately only a matter of time. Looking back, our consistent decision to rely on HTML5 for editor development was the only right one. The area of eCommerce and the associated product individualization of mobile devices has become indispensable in its current form and is already regarded as standard by most consumers today.

3D in Web2Print is a very hot topic at the moment. Many consumers want to be able to "grasp" the product they have designed themselves in the editor even better visually afterwards. In my opinion, there are some sectors that can benefit more than others from this additional added value, depending on the complexity of the respective products. The packaging sector can certainly be used as a prime example here, as the possibility of using an additional 3D preview has experienced a real boom in the last year. We are observing the trend that more and more online printers are expanding their product portfolio to include the "packaging" category and that independent portals are increasingly being created around the topic of "packaging". Although the focus is still mainly on the B2B sector, the B2C sector is also offering more and more diverse opportunities to gain a foothold in this sector.

From a technological point of view, the implementation of a high-quality 3D preview in the browser represents a major challenge. For this reason, it was previously not possible to generate an image of the product in real time and then place it over a three-dimensional body. In order to make the best possible use of the technological possibilities here too, we said goodbye to our previous editor last year and developed a completely new solution, which is now also based on HTML5, but relies entirely on the HTML5 canvas element.

This HTML element can be imagined quite simply as a drawing area on which text as well as shapes and images can be placed. With the help of Canvas, it is now possible to create an image of the customization and then place it directly over a corresponding 3D model. In addition to this, Canvas also offers us a number of other advantages. On the one hand, we are no longer reliant on HTML for text functions and on the other hand, we can improve the performance of the editor by minimizing DOM elements.

In conclusion, I can say that we were able to take an important technological step forward last year and that our "printformer" means we are well equipped for the many future trends in the areas of "web-to-print" and "mass customization".