Pageflex, a division of Bitstream Inc.announced the immediate availability of Pageflex Studio ID, a desktop variable data publishing (VDP) plug-in for Adobe InDesign CS4. This newest offering in the Pageflex product line marries the company’s more than dozen years of industry-leading expertise in variable composition to the visual power and graphic creativity of Adobe InDesign. The plug-in will be available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms.
Pageflex Studio ID enables users to design, setup, and run variable data projects directly in InDesign CS4. No conversion to a Pageflex format is necessary.
“Pageflex Studio ID offers Adobe InDesign users a wonderful opportunity to begin working with Pageflex while staying in the InDesign creative environment that they are familiar with. This is especially important for the Macintosh graphic design community that has always been hesitant to try Pageflex products on the Windows platform,” comments Anna Chagnon, Bitstream President and CEO. “We are excited to introduce the creative Macintosh community to the power of Pageflex for developing one-to-one communications.”
“One of the goals of InDesign is to increase our customers’ productivity and improve workflows. Now, with Pageflex Studio ID, InDesign users have the ability to use Pageflex’s popular variable data capabilities without leaving the InDesign workspace,” said Lynly Schambers-Lennox, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe InDesign.
Pageflex Studio ID produces database-driven personalization of graphically-rich documents. The InDesign application becomes project central for VDP campaigns, giving users access in one project file to multiple related templates and assets. Users can simply create one set of variables and variable business rules and then apply them to any template in the project. This centralization of a project is a hallmark of Pageflex variable data applications and saves time and cost by eliminating the need to re-create components for each template.
Pageflex Studio ID includes an intuitive point-n-click business rule editor for creating if-then-else rules, and support for Adobe ExtendScript when a project requires more complex rules.
“Along with basic variable data features for changing text and images, we’ve incorporated some of the more advanced functionality that existing Pageflex power users love such as centralized project management and our extensive scripting API called Pageflex Actions, which can be used to dynamically manipulate every aspect of an InDesign document on-the-fly,” explains Jeff Perk, Director of Product Management at Bitstream.
Grégoire Poncet, Solution Leader at iware sa, a Pageflex reseller and graphic arts provider based in Morges, Switzerland comments on Pageflex Studio ID by noting: “In the past, you would need at least two design tools to produce graphically rich variable data documents – InDesign for the design and Pageflex for the flexibility and variability. Pageflex Studio ID brings both of those tools together in one powerful resource. I have been impressed with what I was able to produce.”
Pageflex Studio ID also provides a migration path for those customers who want to make their VDP projects available in a Web-to-print storefront now or in the future. Using Pageflex Studio ID, users can prepare variable data templates and projects for use in Pageflex Storefront, the industry-leading and award-winning web-to-print solution. These templates then can be packaged and uploaded to Pageflex Storefront. The files remain in the native Adobe InDesign format throughout the Pageflex Storefront workflow. The templates can come from a Macintosh or Windows version of Pageflex Studio ID.
Pageflex Storefront 7.0 includes integration with Adobe InDesign CS4 Server so that native InDesign documents can be selected, customized, and ordered through a web browser. The templates retain all of the design and variable richness as when they are used directly in Pageflex Studio ID.
“One of our driving principles for the Pageflex product line is to make it easy for our customers to add new capabilities as their business needs expand,” says Chagnon. “The migration path from Pageflex Studio ID to Pageflex Storefront is simple and compelling. Companies can begin by producing database-driven jobs with Pageflex Studio ID, such as menus and direct mail postcards, and then move these documents to Pageflex Storefront once they are ready to have remote franchise staff localize the materials online using Pageflex Storefront with their Web browser.”
Pageflex Studio ID is available now, on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms, from Pageflex and its resellers. It is priced at $695, which includes output drivers for PostScript, PDF, and PPML, as well as one year of support and access to online Pageflex user forums.
For more information about Bitstream please visit http://www.bitstream.com.