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Bitstream made an announcement last week of their intent to support InDesign and InDesign Server in Pageflex in the future. Their media release is rather vague and doesn't really give away much, so I stopped by Bitstream's stand at drupa to get the scoop on what they're working on.
First, it's important to understand what Pageflex does and how it's unique from other VDP offerings on the market. Pageflex's strength, as the product name implies, is in "flexing pages". Pageflex enables you to establish relationships between different objects on a document page and if the content in the object (e.g. a text or image) changes in size, then other objects on the page are transformed proportionally. Relationships between page objects can be established as horizontal or vertical alignment, and page objects or groups of objects can be nested within parent objects.
Just as Pageflex has the ability to flex page objects, it can also flex page sizes, so each recipient could have a different sized document. While there's not really an application for this in variable-data printing (it would be a guillotine nightmare), this ability might be useful when creating template-driven applications that need flexibility in page size, for example newspaper classifieds.
While Pageflex already offer an InDesign plug-in, they do not use InDesign as their composition environment. Their current plug-in provides the ability to export a document into the Pageflex XML-based template format, which can then be opened in Pageflex Studio to create business rules and create a print-ready file. The planned integration of InDesign will enable Bitstream to use InDesign and InDesign Server for document composition.
As Pageflex's core value proposition is built around it's own proprietary composition engine, it would seem odd that they have chosen to adopt InDesign as a composition engine which doesn't give the ability to dynamically change page sizes or have the same level of control for transforming objects that Pageflex offers. Bitstream explained to me that this development will be an additional product direction. They will not be switching from their current composition environment, but additionally offering an InDesign workflow for applications that do not require a level of flexing control.
When I asked Bitstream how this InDesign workflow will fit in to their exisiting publishing workflow, they told me that "we don't know what we wan't to do with InDesign ... we are looking at InDesign to see where it fits in our product line". They weren't able to give me an availability date either. While Bitstream's announcement seems very premature, it will be interesting to see how they bring this integration to market.
Posted on Saturday, 31 May 2008 at 2:14 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/141