Everyone is talking about web-to-print systems. In this article about our customer Utsch24.de, we take a closer look at how our printformer can be used in a very specific and uncomplicated way.

Every car has it and yet it is hardly noticed: the license plate. The company behind it is Erich Utsch AG from Siegen, where millions of license plates are produced every year for customers from all over the world. For over five decades, the global market leader has been responsible for technologies and integrated system solutions for the production, personalization, registration and identification of license plates. It also offers a wide range of products such as license plate blanks, vehicle recycling systems, laminators and laser coding systems. In addition to the classic license plate, windshield labels, license plate holders and FUN plates can also be found here.

How can a license plate manufacturer use our web-to-print system? Utsch AG, together with the dotfly agency, has come up with a creative service for its private customers: an online store in which an individual license plate holder, the desired license plate or a decorative FUN plate can be designed. The "Configure" button opens our converted HTML5 editor in a mobile-first version and can therefore be used on a tablet.

The idea behind mobile first is that the presentation works first on mobile devices. Up to now, optimization for desktop screens has come first. This means that the mobile-first version is limited to the essentials. The clear advantage here is that no additional app needs to be used.

Now slowly again, how does the Web2Print system actually work as a "commercial tool"? The prinformer can be used to create quotations for any print product. The system can be used universally for the entire printing industry, so the settings can be flexibly adapted to the respective product. Thanks to the printformer's API functionality, the calculator can be embedded in any external system; at GGP Media, this is the Magento store system. There are two options before the calculation: fixed price lists and configurable functions. Firstly, an Excel file with pre-defined prices can be imported; our web-to-print system links these with selectable properties. This means that price combinations can be defined individually for each customer. Secondly, properties can be stored in the admin, whereby an option, e.g. finishing of the book, is linked to a specific price. The price changes automatically depending on the setting and the number of products.

The printformer not only serves as a design tool , as is the case with the online store Utsch24.de, but also enables the quick and easy calculation of books from GGP Media's 18 km high book tower.

To give you an idea of where web-to-print is used and how our printformer can be applied, I will present some projects with our customers on this blog.

A tower of 1 million print products 18 kilometers high is created, symbolically speaking, every day at GGP Media. Eight books are produced every second. This requires 70,000 tons of paper every year, which corresponds to an area the size of Saarland. The large print shop has been part of the Bertelsmann Printing Group since the beginning of 2016. GGP Media offers a wide range of services: pre-press service, production of e-books and print products such as brochures, paperbacks, catalogs, leaflets as well as further processing and logistics.

With the words print jobs, pre-press service and catalogs, web-to-print can't be far away. And so it is. Our printformer is used at GGP Media as a powerful calculation tool for huge quantities of paper and countless print products. The web-to-print system is used, for example, to calculate a book with all its settings such as number of pages, material and finishing. Once the selection process is complete, a PDF file is generated and stored as a quotation. Providing your customers with a binding quote is a time-consuming process, but with the calculator, GGP Media can show how much it will cost to produce a book in just a few minutes.

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".

The topic of web-to-print has long since arrived in specialist circles in the IT and printing industry. However, "average consumers", managing directors and their employees or long-established printers are not very familiar with it at first. Just like the student trainee whose job it is to introduce web-to-print to these DEFINITION WEB-TO-PRINT AND WEB-TO-PUBLISH
target groups.

The explanations on the websites of web-to-print system providers remain at a technical level with their wording. Some articles at least give a brief insight into the technology of a web-to-print system. Nevertheless, the topic remains abstract and many questions remain unanswered: What exactly is it now? How does the process work? Where can it be used? And who benefits from it? Detailed research, organizing facts and structuring the most important questions will help you find comprehensible answers. But who reads pages and pages of text these days?