Delphi Labs has urged digital print companies to sign up to its FilePrint automated web-to-print system, which it has just updated with the launch of an automated imposition module.

The latest addition to the Gateshead-based company’s e-commerce platform allows any PDF uploaded to the FilePrint website to be imposed and sent directly to press with no human intervention.

Delphi claimed that the FilePrint website, which it is opening up from its six current print partners to all digital printers, would “revolutionize digital print” by reducing the minimum order that can be processed profitably.

The web-hosted system, which has processed 45,000 orders to date at a total print value of £1m, costs printers £100 per month for the first six months subscription, followed by a 10% usage charge.

Andy Bex, chief executive of Delphi Labs, said: “This is the best way for printers to develop their digital business without making a huge financial commitment to buying resilient servers, internet access, costly software licenses and dedicated specialist personnel.”

Delphi, which launched FilePrint five years ago, currently has three print partners in the UK, one in India and two in the US.

The software developer is also making its search engine optimization expertise available to printers to help migrate their existing customers and to get the most out of their print-on-demand business.

“Delphi urges digital printers to join FilePrint� Simon Nias, printweek.com, 15 July 2009

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.