Facsimile and static presentation processing – Static presentation processing – Detail of image placement or content
Reexamination Certificate
1998-09-10
2001-07-03
Coles, Edward (Department: 2622)
Facsimile and static presentation processing
Static presentation processing
Detail of image placement or content
C358S001160, C358S001170, C358S001180, C382S180000, C382S234000, C382S172000, C382S280000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06256108
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Technical Field
The invention relates to printing data that are stored in an electronic format. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for printing variable data.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A personalized print job is a description of a document composed of a number of copies, where each copy can be uniquely customized for the intended recipient. The pages are composed of text, graphics, and images which can be unique to just that copy, identical on every copy, or used on some copies of the document but not on others. For example, in a customized product brochure, unique elements can include the recipient's name and address, while the product company name and logo are identical on every copy, and the picture of the specific product that the recipient is interested in is found on some copies of the document, but not on others.
A personalization system includes every component that is required to build and print a personalized job. The front end of the system is the job creation process, which is generally driven by a database and authoring applications which build the description of a personalized job. The system also includes a raster image processor (RIP) and a printing system on the back end, which is optimized for the characteristics of the job, i.e. to print the job as fast as is possible.
The RIPing system needs to be able to deliver pages at least as fast as the rated engine speed of the output device. To this end, it must be possible to design a document that is largely made up of reusable page elements. Page elements can be text, graphics, images, or a combination thereof. Each personalized copy of a job can contain some unique information and some subset of these reusable page elements arranged by the document designer. Some of these elements are only used once, some are used on every copy of the document, and some are used only on select copies.
In a personalized job, page elements need only be RIPed once, then combined at the print engine. By only RIPing each element one time, unique documents can be delivered on-the-fly as quickly as possible.
Until now, personalized printing has been limited primarily to mass mailings such as utility and credit card bills, and specialized direct mail pieces. Applications are highly specialized for these specific uses and are costly to implement. Typically such applications have a high development cost, but generate very large volumes resulting in a low per-copy cost that tends to justify the initial high development cost.
For example, target marketing is generally considered to be less expensive and more effective than mass campaigns. Using demographic information to customize messages to the target audience produces significantly higher response rates. As time goes on, more and more information is collected from customer transactions. Companies use this information to customize their messages to their audience. They are then able to minimize their costs while realizing a greater return on investment.
FIG. 1
is a block schematic diagram that shows a general description of the data flow of a personalization front end system. The front end of a personalization system is composed of all of the applications necessary to build a personalized job that is delivered to the RIP.
FIG. 1
depicts a simple data flow of the front end applications. It does not show the work flow which is described in more detail later. Such applications come in many shapes and sizes. Most personalization applications contain the above components in one form or another, but do not necessarily use them in the same ways. The majority of the front end applications are built by third party developers specializing in layout design, building graphics, and database design and access.
The following is a general description of the components of a front end system.
Database
14
: Contains all of the information that are queried to generate the data set. It may contain demographics for target customers who receive customized bills or sales information. It could also contain information about a region of the country to drive specific versions of a sale catalog. For example, prices may differ by region, or depending on the current weather in the area, specific kinds of clothes could be chosen.
Page Elements
10
: Page definition language describes a picture (e.g. graphics, or text) to be applied on a page.
A page element is defined in terms of (PDL) (e.g. PostScript, or HP PCL) or any other graphic format (e.g. TIFF or HTML).
Layout Description
12
: A description of the layout (e.g. location, bounding box, orientation) of the elements on a page. A job might have layouts for several different pages. Each copy of the document could be made up of a different number of pages using, and possibly reusing, some or all of the layouts. The following convention is used to describe a page layout:
Page=(Application
1
, Application
2
, . . . Application);
where an Application applies a page element at a page location x,y for purposes of rendering the page element.
Merger
16
: Builds the personalization specification file of the job. It uses the layout descriptions, page elements, and database queries to build a description of the final print job. The output of the Merger is a personalized job
18
.
In the above example, the components of the process for building a personalized job are separate. Ideally, there are different people with different areas of expertise building each of the components of the job.
The page elements library is built by different artists, or potentially by scanning in different elements. There may be many sources of input for each page element.
The layout description is built by a graphic artist or report designer who creates the layout of the document. This person needs some minimal information about the page elements (such as size and rotation) but does not need to have direct access to the data to build the design. The artist also wants to take into account what database fields contain information to be used in the layout. Again, the specific data are not needed, just information about it. Tools are built to make this design process as easy as possible by providing a clean user interface for describing the representation of the page elements, including location, rotation, scale, and bounding box.
The database is most likely built by an information systems professional. The data can be directly generated from different sources of input such as credit card purchase information and past orders from mail catalogs.
FIG. 2
is a block schematic diagram that illustrates how the personalization components fit into a prior art RIPing system. In the prior art (such as the Supra product manufactured by Adobe Systems Inc.(see Personalized Printing, Adobe Systems Inc. (October 1996)); see, also D. Punater, R. Gaspar, V. Kubert, M. Duchesne, Printing Press and Method, U.S. Pat. No. 5,043,749 (Aug. 27, 1991) and D. Punater, R. Gaspar, V. Kubert, M. Duchesne, Printing Press and Method, U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,316 (Aug. 4, 1992), the focus is on RIPing jobs on a page parallel basis for fast throughput. The RIPed pages are then combined at the print engine. The prior art provides the ability to cache and reuse RIPed page elements. Multiple RIPs are used to process page elements in parallel. When this is combined with the reusability of those page elements, the result is improved performance for printing personalized jobs.
The merging is an automatic process generally done on a server. There should be no manual intervention necessary. All of the rules regulating database queries and what to do with nonstandard data should be defined before the merging takes place. The merger is tasked with building a personalized job. It queries the database to determine which information to place in each copy of the personalized document. It also specifies how many pages go in each copy, which template to use for each page, and which page elements to use in each of the fields in the layout description.
The output of t
Dziesietnik Ghilad
Pardo Luis Trabb
Coles Edward
Electronics For Imaging, Inc.
Glenn Michael A.
Lamb Twyler
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