We have added a new print partner - Digiset which based in Gateshead (www.digiset.co.uk)

Some of you are already using this printer and I am hearing lots of good reports. If you cannot access Digiset, let us know and we can either swap you to Digiset or let you order from either Print-Concern of Digiset.

Photo cards are not just for Christmas anymore. Surprise loved ones with a photo Valentines Day card.

“Sending a Valentines Day card is a wonderful way to show someone you care,” says Andy Bex from FilePrint, “The choice of the card, the way it’s personalised, the message inside — all are tangible reminders of your love. And there’s a great range of bespoke products to choose from our offer.”

Our Greeting Card templates are perfect for The Valentines Day. Each card can be customised with a photo, colour palette and a special message inside.

In this day and age, valentines don’t need to be only for boyfriends, girlfriends and husbands and wives — they also make perfect gifts for friends, kids, and parents. And FilePrint has other personalised products to fit the occasion for expressing love this Valentines Day.

Canvas prints are versatile and unusual items that can be personalised with photos, other pictures, and even text in order to create incredible looking items.

1. Birthday Canvas Prints
A birthday canvas print can be a very effective form of personalised gift that uses any photo of the recipient. This photo can be printed exactly as it appears or it can be treated or converted to make it even more unique. Colour photos can be converted to black and white or sepia ones, while any picture can be turned into a colourful and striking pop art print. You can even use a number of photos of the recipient and have them combined into a montage print.

2. Updating Wedding Photos As Anniversary Montage Prints
Most couples enjoy looking back at their wedding photos and reliving memories of the big day, but this popularity means that paper prints can quickly become tired and worn. Canvas prints not only benefit from the use of modern digital photos but can be created from virtually any digital file. Scan wedding photos and have them combined into one large photo montage print for the happy couple to celebrate their anniversary and relive their wedding day.

3. Pop Art Portraits For Your Son Or Daughter’s Birthday
Pop art really is colourful and bright. It can bring character to any room, and because of this it works especially well in vibrant rooms of the home like the playroom, nursery, or child’s bedroom. Why not have a portrait of your son or daughter converted into a pop art print and hung in their room? What child wouldn’t love to have a picture of themselves displayed like this?

4. Stunning Baby Prints
The arrival of a new baby is one of the biggest celebrations in a family’s life and it is one that will undoubtedly be celebrated by every member of the family. A new baby print is the perfect welcome that any new boy or girl will even be able to appreciate when they are old enough to understand. Canvas prints last a lifetime with minimal care and maintenance required to enjoy their great looks throughout this time.

5. Valentines Montages
A Valentines montage is a specially created montage print that can be given to your partner to celebrate the most romantic day of the year. Pick your favourite romantic photos, have them converted into a professional montage, and then add a message of love to be printed around the outside of the pictures. This highly effective montage print is romantic and a great looking use of your favourite photos of the two of you together.6. Celebrating A New Home

Moving home is another of those events that affects the whole family and should be celebrated. It is also a time when the family is looking for ways to personalise every room and may be looking to do so without having to completely decorate the whole house. Photo prints, or canvas prints, allow them to add character and personality to a room without having to redecorate.

source: BigNews.biz

The Telegraph have put together their top 50 Christmas gifts for 2009 and guess what - personlised calendars are right up there. Here’s what they say: “In putting together my dream list I have tried to find something for all ages and to include the latest gizmos, such as the invaluable Sony Reader, which can store up to 350 books and the Acer mini laptop. I’ve also looked for things that are different and individual, but don’t cost the earth – whether it’s a personalized calendar made up of photographs of your loved ones, a subscription to the wonderful, recently re-launched Puffin Post, or the brilliant Rebound Solo tennis trainer. “

It’s a tough market out there right now, customers don’t want to commit to even a modest fee for software. Well here is a solution.

If your product outputs to print, then give the software away FREE and generate your revenue from print.

This is how it works:

- keep your current software version and create a ‘lite’ version which is FREE.
- the lite version has only one output mode- our Print Solution - FilePrint.
- your software charges the customer for the print, then automatically posts the order to our server (or you can pass the print to us and we will charge the customer).
- We then share the margin- it’s that easy.

Benefits:

- The customer pays for a tangible output
- users ‘pay as you go’ generating a continuous revenue stream
- easy to implement
- world distribution

FilePrint has now opened a shop on Ebay Talking to our customers and particularly our affiliates, we found that many of them are already active ebay sellers. As part of our ongoing commitment to these affiliates, FilePrint has now launched an ebay shop. Why did FilePrint do this?

There are three main reasons:

1. FilePrint will offer free listings to all our affiliates, this will increase their market reach and increase sales.

2. FilePrint want to extend the product set of our affiliates by offering additional products, such as Photo Canvas, Calendars and so on. FilePrint are about to launch these products ‘on trial’ in the FilePrint shop.

3. FilePrint intends to share ‘best practice’ across our affiliates. The FilePrint affiliate community is very diverse in skills, product and ebay ability. FilePrint intends to ‘raise everybody’s game’ to maximize all of our sales.

FilePrint also intends to link to the affiliates products from the main FilePrint website. Whilst FilePrint delivers a very friendly and easy to use printing service, there are still many customers who simply do not have the skills to produce their own artwork. By offering our affiliates’ products, many of which are created on demand, we can be sure that all our customer’s requirements are fulfilled.

Some customers experience problems using Mac’s iPages PDF export when using professional printers.

Workaround is a solution which may be useful in this case.

‘(…)When you’re ready to save your Pages document, avoid the temptation to use the Export or Print command to save your file as a PDF. Instead, if you’re running a version of the Mac OS X prior to Tiger, choose File > Print. In the sheet that appears choose Output Options from the third pop-up menu and then PostScript from the Format pop-up menu that appears. Click Save to dismiss this window and then Save again to Save the file. If you’re running Tiger select File > Print and in the resulting sheet click the PDF button, choose Save PDF as PostScript command, and click the Print button.

Now that you have a PostScript file, open it in Preview, where it will be converted to a PDF file. Once there, chose File > Save As and save the file. Although this may seem like you’re unnecessarily going over the same ground twice, saving the file as a PostScript document and then converting it to a PDF within Preview makes the file behave properly in Acrobat. When I did this, the shadows that appeared in Pages and Preview finally made their way to Acrobat as well.’
www.macworld.com/article/44923/2005/05/pagespdf.html

Internet Explorer 8 has issues rendering dhtml effects in the tabs. Users can still use IE8 but in compatibility mode:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/27/introducing-compatibility-view.aspx

Which works fine.

 

Recently I had a trawl around the internet looking for Free/Shareware solutions that might help our FilePrint users.  I am pleased to say that I found some great tools, that are all absolutely free to use, so go on try them out.  We will also be listing these in our support pages, with some additional advice about how to use them.

PicResize

http://www.picresize.com

Does exactly what it says on the tin - re-sizes your images.

• Go to the website:  http://www.picresize.com
• No Login or registration
• Upload your image (not sure what formats are supported)
• You then get to CROP, RESIZE and add EFFECTS
• Save it as JPG, GIF or PNG
• You can then save it to your computer, the web, or open it in an editor (drpic.com)

Great, very friendly product.

DrPic

http://www.drpic.com

This is a very user friendly bitmap editing tool.  Its by the same team who produce PicResize,

• Go to the website:  http://www.drpic.com
• No Login or registration
• Upload your image (not sure what formats are supported)
• All the standard tools are here, ROTATE, CROP, BRUSH, TEXT, etc
• Save it as JPG, GIF or PNG
• You can then save it to your computer, the web, or open it in an editor (drpic.com)

Another great, very friendly product by pic resize.

PDFCreator

http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator

This is the definitive Free PDFDriver.  Unlike most of the other ‘Free’ tools, there are no limitations like watermarks on this tool.  For those who are not familiar with this product, you install it like a print driver, you can then print to it as if it is a desktop printer, but instead of printing it produces a PDF.  In fact it works just like our driver FilePrint.

This effectively means that any application in Windows can now produce a PDF.

If you are going to use it to create jobs for FilePrint, couple of things to look at:

• Make sure you are printing the correct size document, quite often, these tools are set to Letter rather than A4.  Go to Advanced and you can select from a BIG list of sizes.
• Advanced: Set Print Quality to 300 DPI.
• Advanced: Set Fonts to Download softfont
• Advanced: Set to Portable Format
• Advanced: Set fonts to Download Outline.

I know that all sounded very complicated, but, this is a very easy to use PDF product.

Scribus

http://www.scribus.net/

Scribus is a pretty good FREE desktop publishing system.  It has a very easy and quick install, with a 20MB download.

If you are a beginner/intermediate user; this product does everything you need it to do and because alot of the more advanced options just aren’t there - it is nice and clean.

Best of all, it can output directly to PDF.  I like this product so much that I am considering releasing templates to go along with it.

The one draw back for me is that it comes from the world of UNIX, so, it does not drop you into ‘My Documents’ when you want to save things, but, that’s really only a small thing.

Inkscape

http://www.inkscape.org/

This is pretty well a full blown vector image tool (i.e. Illustrator, Corel Draw).   Its a big product so I have not had time to have a real go at it, but, everything that I would normally want are there.  This actually supports the SVG format, which you might not be familiar with.  Great things were predicted of SVG, it was going to become the standard, but never quite got the momentum needed.

I have had time to look at the output and again, we have a very good Save AS / PDF tool.  This is very simple, with No Options at all - bar one: Convert Text to Paths.  This is a great little feature as it converts all the fonts into graphics, meaning that it will print PERFECTLY on any device and removes the need to embed fonts.

Again, my small moan is it is from the UNIX world and again like Scribus, the File dialogs are a little ‘odd’ - but all in all a really powerful tool.