printing – Global Graphics Software blog

June 14, 2023June 15, 2023

Innovating beyond ink: where small ideas blossom

Advertising is everywhere, but it might be a new form that captures the imagination: In July 2018 an artist was commissioned by Spotify to create a picture out of a field of crops (Lawhorn, 2018). This was a painstaking labor which consisted of ’34 days in a row of work’. It also used a large amount of weed killer, which can have a negative impact on the environment. — Advertising is everywhere, but it might be a new form that captures the imagination: In July 2018 an artist was commissioned by Spotify to create a picture out of a field of crops (Spotify, 2018). This was a painstaking labor which consisted of 34 days in a row of work. It also used a large amount of weed killer, which can have a negative impact on the environment.

When our software developers take time out in The Shed, our maker space where we try out new technologies and hardware, we never quite know what ideas will surface. But thanks to one software developer’s ingenious creativity we’re now the proud owners of a patent for a method that uses seeds instead of ink to create images.

Former Global Graphics’ software developer Andy Cardy invented the method from a process we use in the printing industry known as screening or half toning. Screening takes a source image with a wide color gamut and creates an output raster format which determines the position and size of droplets of ink required by the printer to recreate the original image.

With this new patent, instead of the output raster format controlling droplets of ink on a printer, it determines:

which plant or seed is planted to create a color reproduction of the original image, allowing for variable space in the reproduction, for example larger drop sizes could represent large foliage plants;
how deep the seed is planted, for variable images throughout the growing season;
where the seed is planted;
and how many seeds are planted.

The screening process and output also takes into account variables such as soil color and its properties. By incorporating these variables, the method guarantees that the final plant-based reproduction appears visually accurate, accounting for the natural hues that may appear between plants, just like we would consider the substrate in the printing industry.

The approach could be suitable for a range of applications including large-scale advertisements, especially on busy flight paths, public artwork and even fallow farmland, where wild bird seed or nectar and pollen sources could be sown in an advertisement image, benefiting both wildlife and the farmer.

Aside from advertising, this technology could be used in place of any activity that would use weed killer or the ploughing of unwanted crops. This could include the methods used to create maize mazes, which are becoming a popular supplemental income option for farmers. The current method of creation is to sow the whole field, then destroy the crop that’s no longer required, tracked by GPS. Instead, this technology would simply avoid planting seeds where they are not required.

Of course, we know from our own gardening experience that things don’t always grow as planned, but there’s a chance we could say goodbye to hours of painstaking work to create that advertisement in a field of crops and hello to a new wave of agricultural artistry!

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March 2, 2023July 17, 2023

We’re back in Lucerne for Hunkeler Innovationdays 2023

The Hybrid Software Group team at Hunkeler Innovationdays 2023

It’s great to be back in Lucerne this week for Hunkeler Innovationdays 2023. We’ve had some interesting conversations and it’s been a good opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues in the industry. But it’s not over yet! If you’re interested in adding a print subsystem to a smart factory or manufacturing line, come and talk to us on booth 45 to find out more about our SmartDFE™.

This year, we’re exhibiting on the Hybrid Software Group booth, alongside our sister companies: ColorLogic, HYBRID Software, iC3D, Meteor Inkjet and Xitron. In this recent interview with Inkish TV, our CEO, Mike Rottenborn, explained how we all work together and what you can expect to see from the Group at Hunkeler Innovationdays:

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February 21, 2023February 21, 2023

Celebrating 20 successful years in Japan

This month we’re celebrating the 20-year anniversary of our Japanese office. We chatted to sales director Hagiwara Yoshiyuki who told us how it all began, how the market has changed and what’s next for his team:

The team from the Global Graphics office in Japan join colleagues at the IGAS exhibition in Tokyo last year. — Hagiwara Yoshiyuki, front left, and the team from the Global Graphics office in Japan join colleagues from Hybrid Software Group at the IGAS exhibition in Tokyo last year.

Tell us about your background. What did you do before you joined Global Graphics Software?

After graduating from university, I worked for a Japanese office computer manufacturer, developing various controller boards, ASICs and semi-custom large-scale integrations. The printer controllers I designed were very successful and widely installed not only in Japan, but also in Europe and Oceania. We were one of the first companies to develop a serial impact printer that prints Kanji characters for the office market. I designed many controller boards and firmware for laser printers, inkjet printers and RIP servers for large format printers. I then set up the Japanese subsidiary of a US company providing PostScript Level 2 interpreter software licenses to printer and MFP manufacturers.

After working with several foreign companies that developed RIP servers and embedded controllers, I established Global Graphics KK as a Japanese subsidiary in 2003.

Tell us about the early days with Global Graphics KK

Initially I rented the smallest room from Servcorp, an office rental company offering fully furnished spaces. On seeing my office, Gary Fry, former CEO with Global Graphics PLC, commented that it was ‘smaller than an elevator’. Over the years I’ve employed more engineers and have changed rooms several times to accommodate us. Today, we are five very talented engineers.

Back in 2003, I offered solutions for the Harlequin RIP® and the PDF creation software, Jaws PDF Creator™. My first customer was Justsystem. We developed the Justsystem PDF Creator, which was sold as a standalone packaging application then bundled as part of their Ichitaro word processing software. Ricoh Ridoc and Fuji Xerox DocuWorks followed.

Today, the team supports a range of products from Hybrid Software Group including, Harlequin, Mako Core™ and SmartDFE™ from Global Graphics Software; color management solutions ColorAnt, CoPrA, ZePrA from ColorLogic; pre-press software for packaging STEPZ®, PACKZ® and CLOUDFLOW® from HYBRID Software; and 3D rendering software for packaging from iC3D.

How has the market changed over the last 20 years? You must have seen a lot of changes.

Yes, there have been many changes:
Firstly, companies that used to develop everything in-house are starting to consider using ready-to-integrate products, which offer a faster time-to-market. Our SmartDFE is ideal for this.

Secondly, the decrease in profits from office MFPs and printers, partly due to less paper being printed to help the environment, means office printer manufacturers are expanding their reach into industrial inkjet printing.

In addition, we’re seeing growth in digital printing, especially printing customized products on demand and in the labels and packaging sector. We’re seeing many new applications, for example, textiles and décor, due to the non-contact printing characteristics of inkjets. Digital inkjet is also growing as it meets many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Ways of doing business are also changing, with more cloud-based solutions and there’s also the introduction of 3D printing.

How important is sustainability in print to the Japanese market? Have you noticed a change in your customers’ requirements so that they can meet their sustainability commitments?

From a sustainability perspective, it’s essential that we consider the SDGs when developing new products and it seems to be easier for a company to follow through with their plans when they are linked to those goals. The amount of ink, electricity and iron needed for large-sized printing machines cannot be ignored. Also, as I mentioned earlier, we need to consider new ways of working to eliminate paper usage.

What’s next for you and your colleagues?

We will focus on promoting ready-to-integrate products, such as SmartDFE. In addition, as an ambassador for the Hybrid Software Group, we’ll focus on promoting the Group’s industry-leading products.

What do you enjoy most about working at Global Graphics KK?

It’s said that Japan is ‘the world’s printer factory’ where there are many printer manufacturers. This has certainly been an advantage; I enjoy building on my experience as a printer controller developer and using my knowledge of PostScript to ensure the best outcomes.

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November 22, 2022November 24, 2022

Addressing real-world software challenges in the print industry

It’s always good to see our technology being used in the ‘real world’; it really helps us to understand our customers’ daily challenges so we can develop software to make their lives easier.

With this in mind, we recently visited Baker Labels, a leading UK trade label printer with over 45 years’ experience in the business. Bakers has three HP Indigo WS6900 presses, an HP Indigo 20000 press, a Truepress Jet L350 UV and L350 UV+LM inkjet press, as well as a Nilpeter FB3 flexographic press.

Managing director Justin Bailey reflects on our visit:

Global Graphics Software’s technology is used by many thousands of printing companies around the world. We’re committed to innovation and to continue to innovate it’s important that our software developers understand the challenges faced by those companies in the printing industry. I wanted to take our team to an environment where the code they have written might be used.

I set out to find a printing company that shared our values in innovation and would be happy to show us around their facilities. My research led me to Baker Labels, a leading UK print provider for the label and packaging market, who embraced the idea of welcoming us and showing us round.

The thing that struck me immediately about Bakers, was the pride they had in their business and the culture they had built, which clearly radiated as soon as you walked through the door. It was also a bonus to learn that they use PACKZ® and CLOUDFLOW® from our sister company, HYBRID Software, to automate many of their processes.

Bakers also work very closely with HP Indigo in both their label printing business, and BakPac, their flexible packaging business. This meant that our Harlequin RIP® engineers could see presses working that used the technology they had developed deep inside the HP Indigo digital front end. This gave them a sense of real purpose and pride.

HP Indigo 6900 at Baker Labels — One of the HP Indigo 20000 presses at Baker Labels.

Baker’s BakPac digital flexible packaging business prints short to medium runs of stand-up pouches, pillow pouches and printed film for trade customers looking for a high-speed-to-market option for their customers.

Bakers’ domain expertise was clear for our team to see: Jamie Godson did an incredible job of explaining the application of technology and challenges that they face within the industry; Jamie Doogan provided important perspective on commercial considerations; and Simon Chandler shared his perspectives on technical infrastructure necessary to stay competitive in the market.

Feedback from my team was overwhelmingly positive and the energy that they got from the visit will be something that I am confident will continue to resonate within our engineering team, spurring on new ideas to solve challenging technical problems. Bakers’ willingness to engage in such conversations will no doubt help us all to do what we do better and facilitate solutions which may well have a broader market application.

On behalf of the Global Graphics Software and Hybrid Software Group PLC, I would like to express my gratitude to Steve Baker and his team for their incredible hospitality and willingness to collaborate. It’s meeting people at companies like Bakers that makes getting out of bed in the morning exciting, and it’s no surprise to me that they are as successful as they are. Long may it continue.

Managing director, Justin Bailey, left, with the team from Global Graphics Software and Jamie Godson, Jamie Doogan and Simon Chandler from Baker Labels.

Justin Bailey, Managing Director, Global Graphics Software

Justin Bailey has been managing director at Global Graphics Software since 2018. He has over 25 years’ experience in the document imaging and print markets.

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July 18, 2022August 1, 2022

Keeping up to date – how the car analogy may no longer be relevant in the printing world

In his latest blog post, Martin Bailey, consultant at Global Graphics Software, takes a look at some of the reasons why his go-to car analogy to help his audience understand the world of print may no longer be as relevant as it once was:

Over the years I’ve used analogies in many of my blog posts, conference presentations and white papers; they’re a very effective way of sharing a high-level understanding of sometimes complex ideas. I’m not a car fanatic, so I’ve not had any specific motivation to compare print technologies to anything around cars, but for some reason it seems that car analogies have consistently just worked, so I’ve used them.

But I realized recently that I’m going to have to rework some of them in response to the growth of electric vehicles replacing internal combustion. I know that growth is very uneven across the world (wow, go Norway!), but it’s clearly the future of motoring for many of us. Much of what I write and report might be summarized as “this is the future and how we’ll get there”, so building on something that will become more and more outdated for many readers and listeners introduces an unwelcome distraction from the analogy. It also makes it less effective because analogies must be based on a common understanding or experience, otherwise they just don’t work.

On the other hand, internal combustion vehicles are not even close to the point yet where all readers and listeners will regard them as dinosaurs of historical interest only. So I can’t sensibly use them as a representation of what we were all doing in the past.

So, I thought I’d look through some of the car-based analogies I’ve used to see which need updating, and which are fine as they are:

I’ve often compared a digital press and its associated digital front end (DFE) to the components of a car:

The supplied job file, probably in PDF, is the fuel
The steering wheel and dashboard are the DFE control systems and user interface
The engine is the RIP (clearly the most important part of the entire system, but then I may be biased!)
The gearbox and transmission are the electronics and drivers, like those from our friends at Meteor inkjet
The wheels are the inkjet heads, actually putting the rubber/ink on the road/substrate

Well, some of those parts still make sense, but I’m not sure that I can equate submitting a PDF file to charging a battery. Somehow the motors in an electric vehicle never seem to have the prominence that I’d personally give to a RIP. And the motors are often linked direct to the wheels, with less of the gearbox and transmission infrastructure than you’d use for internal combustion. This one needs some serious fixing.

Next up is a statement that we used, for example, in Full Speed Ahead: how to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press: that making a PDF file constructed for efficiency is like using better fuel in a car. There can be a clear step-up from regular to super for gasoline/petrol, but electricity is electricity, at least once it’s in the car battery.

I guess you could argue that charging points with different power capabilities, from 7kW up to 350kW, will significantly affect how long it will take to recharge the car, and therefore on how far you can get in a day, but it’s not really the same discussion. That’s another analogy that I’m going to have to work on.

And finally, for now, I’ve described companies who build digital presses without thinking about software to process job files and proper user interfaces as being like people thinking they can sell rolling chassis: cars with no bodywork, no seats and not even a cup-holder. You may get a few sales for that in specialist markets, but it’s not exactly a mass market.

Of the three analogies I’ve listed here, I think this is the only one that might survive unscathed, although it probably has less value without being able to equate the other bits of the car to digital press and DFE components.

As I said to start with, I had no reason to pick cars as the base for analogies that I use other than that they seemed to work well. I have a feeling that may not be as true in the future. I guess there did have to be one advantage to big oil!

About the author

Martin Bailey, CTO, Global Graphics Software

Martin Bailey, consultant at Global Graphics Software, is a former CTO of the company and currently the primary UK expert to the ISO committees maintaining and developing PDF and PDF/VT. He is the author of Full Speed Ahead: how to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press, a guide offering advice to anyone with a stake in variable data printing including graphic designers, print buyers, composition developers and users.

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April 12, 2022April 13, 2022

Smarter software – the role of software in the smart factories of the future

At the InPrint Munich 2022 exhibition, our VP of products and services, Eric Worrall, sat down for a chat with Marcus Timson of FuturePrint. They discussed the future role that software will play in connecting print to the fully automated smart factory and how, as the print subsystem becomes an integral part of the smart factory, the press will self-monitor, ensuring color is right, checking ink levels and even predicting when printheads need replacing.

Watch it here:

Find out more about connecting print to the smart factory: SmartDFE™ is a full software and hardware stack that adds print to the fully automated smart factory.

Further reading:

Connecting print to the smart factory

AI – Man vs Machine – a new way of thinking?

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March 31, 2022April 5, 2022

Connecting the present to the past

I finally made time for a very overdue tidy of my filing cabinet yesterday. In between wondering why I still had receipts from travel in 2003, I tripped over a piece of history: it’s a Harlequin Harpoon board, a hardware accelerator for halftone screening and part of the technology that allowed Harlequin to become the first to RIP the Seybold Musicians’ speed test page in under 60 seconds.

A Harlequin Harpoon board, a hardware accelerator for halftone screening and part of the technology that allowed Harlequin to become the first to RIP the Seybold Musicians' speed test page. — A Harlequin Harpoon board, a hardware accelerator for halftone screening.

Speed is still a key focus for Global Graphics Software, but the Harpoon was designed for screening for offset plates, and developments in chips and compilers by Intel, AMD, Microsoft and others, together with further optimizations to Global Graphics Software code, removed the need for custom hardware for that use case fairly soon afterwards.

Today’s challenge is much more for digital presses, and especially for inkjet. Current press speeds make the idea of celebrating RIPping and screening a single page in less than a minute seem quaint and even slightly bizarre; very last millennium! The fastest digital presses now print well over the equivalent of 10,000 pages per minute, often with every page different, which means that at least something on every page must be RIPped and screened, at full engine speed.

For that kind of performance, or even a more common 100 m/min for a narrow-web label press, it’s now normal to use multiple RIPs in parallel and to share the pages out between them. This makes it tricky to use custom hardware unless that is tied to specific ink channel delivery, because otherwise it must be load-balanced in a way that complements the load-balancing across the RIPs. We still see some custom hardware associated with raster delivery to the heads in the press, but nowhere else in current systems.

For the same reason, increasing the raw speed of a single RIP is no longer a target; scheduling pages to each RIP in a cluster and managing the rasters delivered by each one, together with managing the interactions between those multiple RIPs, are far more important. System engineering is now a key part of being able to drive inkjet presses at full speed without an unfeasibly high bill of materials for the Digital Front End, almost as much as the core technologies themselves.

In other words Global Graphics’ Direct™ and SmartDFE™ technologies are the logical successors of the Harpoon board, bringing affordable and reliable speed to a new generation of printing technology. But there’s still something rather nice in being able to hold a physical piece of history in my hands!

About the author

Martin Bailey, Distinguished Technologist, Global Graphics Software, is currently the primary UK expert to the ISO committees maintaining and developing PDF and PDF/VT and is the author of Full Speed Ahead: how to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press, a new guide offering advice to anyone with a stake in variable data printing including graphic designers, print buyers, composition developers and users.

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November 17, 2021April 5, 2022

XAML-icious graphics in Mako Core

Creating discrete graphics in Mako Core™ with XAML

It’s not often that one is inspired by the introduction of a new feature in an SDK, but that has happened with Mako 6.3.0 and support for something rather drily known as Abbreviated Geometry Syntax. The inspiration arises because this way of describing geometry – curved and straight lines that form a shape, sometimes filled, sometimes not, that can be added to a page – derives from Microsoft’s XPS (XML Print Specification). But crucially it also appears in XAML, the language used by Windows to describe user interface (UI) designs.

Why is this significant? Some time ago I wrote a Mako sample that would take a regular PDF page, expand it then adorn it with printers’ marks. You know the sort of thing – tick marks that indicate the trimmed size of the page, or the edge of the bleed, and colour bars or gray scales that enable a printer to see a patch of 100% of an ink color, or the gradation from white to black. It also included small targets printed with all inks to help spot registration problems. The graphic itself was simple, but how to generate it with code? The APIs in Mako were somewhat unwieldy when it came to drawing on the page, so much so that I found it easier to copy content from another document.

Having created many discrete graphics in XAML to be used in a Windows application, such as a button or an indicator of some sort, I thought then it would be great to be able to convert a XAML snippet into Mako DOM objects that I could add to a PDF page. At the time, that was too much work. But with this new feature, it’s very straightforward, particularly in C# as there is great support for parsing XML. I began experimenting.

Draw a sample
The first step was to create a graphic to test with that wouldn’t be too challenging but at the same time cover the principal elements found on a XAML canvas – the <Canvas> element itself then paths, rectangles and text blocks with their attendant properties for fill, stroke, color, font etc. Thus was born Funny Robot that you can see here in a screengrab from Visual Studio (VS). .

Figure 1: My funny robot and the XAML that draws him

I often use VS for creating XAML graphics graphically; as you do so, the XAML is written for you. Plus, you can edit the code and immediately see the result in the preview window. Besides Visual Studio and its sibling Blend for Visual Studio, there’s Microsoft’s Expression Design 4. Unfortunately, Microsoft now consider it defunct, but there are those that think as I do that it is a very useful tool and have made it available for download. You will find it easily with a web search for “Expression Design 4”. This tool can import an Adobe Illustrator graphic which is an incredibly valuable feature, one not found in Visual Studio

Coding the solution
The C# that I wrote for this first loads the XAML code as a .NET XmlDocument, then creates Mako DOM object(s) for each XAML element it finds, which are added to a Mako IDOMGroup. Once parsing is complete, that group of objects can then be added to a page, positioned and scaled as required. For the purposes of the example, I simply add the group to a new blank page and save it as a PDF.

The complete code can be found on the MakoSDK GitHub page, alongside the Funny Robot XAML.

Working with spot colors in Harlequin Core

Whenever we start working with a company who’s interested in using Harlequin Core™ for their Digital Front End (DFE), there are always three technical topics under discussion: speed, quality and capabilities. Speed and quality are often very quick discussions; much of the time they’ve approached us because they’re already convinced that Harlequin can do what they need. In the remaining cases we tend to jointly agree that the best way for them to be convinced is for them to take a copy of Harlequin Core and to run their own tests. There’s nothing quite like trying something on your own systems to give yourself confidence in the results.

So that leaves capabilities.

If the company already sells a DFE using a different core RIP they will almost always want to at least match, and usually to extend, the functionality of their existing solution when they switch to Harlequin. And if they’re building their first DFE they usually have a clear idea of what their target market will need.

At that stage we start by ensuring that we all understand that Harlequin Core can deliver rasters in whatever format is required (color channels, interleaving, resolution, bit depth, halftoning) and then cover color management pretty quickly (yes, Harlequin uses ICC profiles, including v4 and DeviceLink; yes, you can chain multiple profiles in arbitrary sequences, etc).

Then we usually come on to a series of questions that boil down to handling spot colors:

Most spot separations in jobs will be emulated on my digital press; can I adjust that emulation?
Can I make sure that the emulation works well with ICC profiles for different substrates?
Can I include special device colorants, such as White and Silver inks in that emulation?
Can I alias one spot separation name to another?
Can I make technical separations, like cut and fold lines, completely disappear, without knocking out if somebody upstream didn’t set them to overprint?
Alternatively, can I extract technical separations as vector graphics to drive a cutter/plotter with?

Since the answer to all of those is ‘yes’ we can then move on to areas where the vendor is looking for a unique capability …

But I’ve always been slightly disappointed that we don’t get to talk more about some of the interesting corners of spot handling in Harlequin. So I created a video to walk through some examples. Take a look, and I’d welcome your comments and questions!

Head, inks, substrates – don’t forget the software!

Martin Bailey, distinguished technologist at Global Graphics Software, chats to Marcus Timson of FuturePrint in this episode of the FuturePrint podcast. They discuss Martin’s role in making standards work better for print so businesses can compete on the attributes that matter, and software’s role in solving complex problems and reducing manual touchpoints in workflows.

They also discuss the evolution of software in line with hardware developments over the last few years, managing the increasing amounts of data needed to meet the demands of today’s print quality, the role of Global Graphics Software in key market segments and more.

Listen in here:

Head, ink and substrates, don't forget the software. A FuturePrint podcast with Martin Bailey

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