Uncover the mystery of PPML

The concept of PPML

A brand-new, industry-standard printing language based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) technology is gaining more and more attention in the industry. It is PPML. PPML's English name is Personalized Print Markup Language, Chinese means "personalized print markup language". It is a personalized print markup language developed by several member companies of the PODi Alliance. PPML uses XML as the basis of the syntax, making PPML and other many Web applications have a close relationship.

The function of this language is to be able to quickly print documents that contain reusable page content. Before the PPML language, although it is also possible to print personalized documents, a closed digital printing system is generally used for personalized printing. Therefore, PPML is the first industry standard language for personalized printing.

Speaking of PPML, we must also introduce the PODi Alliance. PODi is a consortium created by a number of companies involved in the field of digital printing. It was founded in 1996 by companies such as the famous Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, and Scitex. Its goal is to promote the development of Print On Demand applications, so the original name of PODi was Is the "Print On Demand initiative". Today, the influence of PODi is getting bigger and bigger, and there are more and more member companies. At present, the purpose of PODi's work is mainly to spread knowledge and develop standardized language, so as to promote the development of digital printing applications.

Retrospective history

In 1993, the first color digital printing machine was introduced. Since then, digital printing technology has developed rapidly, while digital printing has promoted the development of the personalized printing market. However, due to the use of closed, dedicated software and hardware systems for personalized digital printing, each company's personalized digital printing solutions use different standards, and the front and rear end (RIP) of digital printing systems from different manufacturers. There is no "interoperability" between them. Instead, they use their own separately recognized language format. As a result, closed digital printing systems hinder the further development of the personalized printing market.

The end result of a closed system has many limitations on the digital printing work environment. Before the prepress designer starts to design the original document, the first question to be considered is to select the back-end output of the digital printing system; and the printing company has little choice of driver software and software compatibility regardless of the hardware purchased. This is a headache; for software development companies that are interested in developing personalized digital printing software, they are also faced with difficult decisions; or they can write drivers for various output devices so that they can support more output devices, or Writing drivers for several kinds of output devices will restrict the acceptance of software in the market. Therefore, hardware companies that provide digital printing solutions often have difficulty convincing software development companies to support their own output devices. In turn, this situation restricts the ability of hardware output devices to capture the digital printing market.

Obviously, before PPML did not appear, personalized digital printing faced a dilemma: lack of an industry standard language, digital printing system can not effectively use some variable page content. Digital printing systems are in their own right. Each digital press manufacturer develops its own solution and its own printing technology and uses different software for its own technology. As a result, the entire digital printing market is flooded with closed and incompatible digital printing solutions. There is no compatibility between the software and hardware of different systems. Even though two sets of digital printing systems have some similar characteristics, the document file format adopted by the system is the company's own specialized document format. They cannot achieve interoperability. Designing a created document in a digital printing system cannot be performed. Another set of digital printing systems.

This situation has hindered the promotion of digital printing technology and digital printing applications. In turn, it affects the enthusiasm of developers interested in digital printing to participate in this huge market. The digital printing market has not been widely promoted and expanded.

In 1999, to solve this problem, PODi organized seven members to vote unanimously to develop a new standardized printing language for personalized digital printing. Since then, more and more companies have joined the development of standard languages, among which are Adobe Systems, Agfa, Barco, and IBM.

In 2000, PODi introduced the first PPML language standard. Since then, closed digital printing environments are expected to change. All digital printing system solution companies in the world have adopted a standardized output language. Software and hardware development vendors have freed themselves from the problems of closed systems, helping them to expand their market share. For printing companies and printing customers, there are more systems (hardware and software) for them to choose from. Prepress designers do not have to worry about what output technology is used at the back end of the digital printing system. They can put more effort into document design work.

Seven Features of PPML

One of the characteristics: PPML is a meta language

PPML is a meta-language, which can describe the structure, documents, pages, etc. of printed jobs. It places the "identification" on the page via PPML<MARK>, and the PPML (MARK) element points to the page data, for example to an EPS file (Encapsulated Postscript).

PPML itself does not describe page content. Instead, the PPML selection page element is placed on a page. The PPMl language does not have features such as drawing and color fill on the page. The coding function of PPML is to place a file named ****.EPS somewhere on the page.

The second characteristic: Personalization is the essence of PPML

The essence of the PPML language is "personalization." With the increasing popularity of the Internet, personalized digital printing has intensified. The digital color printing technology that was introduced in 1993 made it possible to print high-quality, color personalized information. However, digital printing technology has not been in close contact with the huge potential personal printing market. One of the most basic reasons is that there is no industry-standard language for printing high-quality, page-content reusable color documents. Postscript is the most popular language in the printing field, but it is a page description language. For non-image languages, such as PCL and AFP, there is no way to define an image, or to effectively reuse high-quality images (variable information), especially color images. Therefore, neither Postscript nor PCL and AFP can afford the task of personalizing digital printing standard language. Heavy responsibility comes to PPML because it has the essence of personalization.