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.

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.

FilePrint, the internet printer, is announcing a new Affiliate scheme. Companies may now offer their clients print-on-demand and earn 25% margin on all orders. You simply need to sign up as an affiliate. And you can then also enjoy the same low prices even for your own print needs.

It works by designers or agencies offering their clients the chance to buy professional quality print over the internet. Clients design, upload and order print from their desktops, with pre-noon orders delivered next day.

Chief executive Andy Bex says, “We wanted to create a new way for companies to earn margin on a new service to their clients. If you can influence print buying, or simply want to recommend professional quality, low cost print, you can earn margin on all the print your clients purchase.�

This new service is especially good for short runs. Flyers cost a fraction of the price of conventional print, because they are printed using new generation colour digital printers. You can now order and pay for just one brochure at a time or as few as you want.

Users simply create and upload a PDF and order the required quantity online through an affiliate account. Alternatively, companies can install the free FilePrint driver on their clients systems which lets clients to order print directly from any Microsoft application.

FilePrint offers a full range of paper qualities and print sizes up to A0 oversize and can cost-effectively print from a single copy with no set-up charge. There’s a range of finishes including binding, laminating, folding and trimming. So, any type of document can be produced including stationery, brochures, business cards, show cards, bound manuals, posters, flyers and price lists.

A choice of delivery services is offered throughout the UK including delivery directly to customers. There is no minimum order, and orders are normally delivered within two working days, regardless of UK location.

Companies can sign up to the service
here