Web-to-print, also known as Web2Print, remote publishing or print e-commerce is commercial printing using web sites. Companies and software solutions that deal in web-to-print use standard e-commerce and online services like hosting, website design, and cross-media marketing. Partners and customers may submit print jobs, do online pre-press reviews/previews, design things like postcards directly on a website using rich user interfaces, direct cross-media marketing and offer services such as variable data printing, photo printing, booklets, and marketing campaigns.
Overview Web-to-print sites are available for commercial users or to the general public. A common offering from print houses is public or private online storefronts or catalogues. Web-to-print increasingly calls for a Portable Document Format (PDF) workflow environment with output provided by digital printing; although there is certainly no requirement that fulfillment be accomplished using digital production equipment; web-to-print is also used today by printers with both offset and digital production facilities. Prepress reviews can be done online, allowing a print house, a client, and possibly a graphic designer to create, edit, and approve computer-based online artwork. Some web-to-print sites offer online print products that replace editing tools like Adobe InDesign where buyers can author work and alter the typeface, copy, images, and layout. These products often include a library of templates for product types, such as postcards, posters, flyers etc. It is frequently possible for clients to upload their own unique content for automated print production. This may be termed Ad Hoc printing. When a digital press is used for the final output, the template usually is transformed into a PDF file that serves as the ‘master plate’ for the digital press. In more traditional printing processes, like offset printing, the template is used to create a plate or plates that are used to produce the final printed product. Web-to-print sites often provide approval mechanism so that managers can approve print requests by their employees. Materials produced by a web-to-print process include business cards, brochures, and stationery, among other printed matter, that can be printed in full color or in black and white on various papers and on various presses. Web-to-print systems are also expanding to handle personalization and distribution of other marketing materials such as presentations, seminars, logo items, and even email and other electronic media. This change is driven by enterprise clients seeking a single repository/tool to manage all marketing efforts including print.
Comparisons and differences The front-end of the web-to-print process is similar to desktop publishing (DTP) in that individuals or graphic designers use desktop publishing software to create pre-defined templates. These templates are then posted online for later customization by end-users and automated production by a print house or commercial printer. Unlike DTP, web-to-print can bypass the use of traditional design tools by the end-user as the templates utilized in this process are based upon a WYSIWYG (often browser-based) interface that can be edited and approved by a client and by the print house without a graphic designer’s assistance. Commercial web-to-print applications can include both print on demand (POD) or pre-printed materials that are pulled from inventory. POD documents can have static content or include elements of variable data printing (VDP), a form of POD that is mainly used for personalization of marketing materials with product or customer data that is pulled from a database. VDP is geared toward mass customization, whereas web-to-print focuses only on changes made from order to order. VDP pre-dates web-to-print although at that time the design process was carried out via close collaboration with the printer for documents such as invoices.
Origin of the phrase The origin of the phrase "web to print" is unknown, but an online public example was made by Jim Frew when he used of the phrase in an online article entitled, "From Web to Print," for Webmonkey, an online resource for web designers, on 9 February 1999. This article was geared toward web designers who wanted to know more about DTP and the printing process from commercial, technical, and design aspects. However, the trademark for the phrase actually belongs to Belmark, Inc., a label printing company in De Pere, Wisconsin. Belmark was initially granted this trademark in 1999 and renewed it in January 2011. The use of the term "web-to-print" from the perspective of a transition between web-driven technology to printed matter means that the term "web" connotes the World Wide Web (WWW), rather than the web that is used as a term for a web rotary press developed by William Bullock. Bullock’s web press revolutionized newspaper printing, and the WWW is now used to alter how corporations and individuals create commercial and personal printed matter. The term has become ubiquitous, as businesses have picked upon the "Web2Print" phrase to name software designed specifically to manage the web-to-print process. Graphic design and web design firms that have branched out into print services also use the term to subhead their company trade name, or they use the phrase as a subheading for public relations materials.
History DTP’s history provides the groundwork for current web-to-print expansion, and the onset of e-commerce between 1998 and 2000 created an environment for web-to-print to prosper. However, web-to-print and the framework for it had been well established by commercial developments in some years before this. For instance Xerox Corporation (one of the companies that has been attributed to the origins of the Internet) had a commercial product available for sale in 1995 called InterDoc, which is described as software that allowed printing departments to receive and produce digital file submissions from customers over the Internet.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
