Advanced Job Finishing

Job Finishing is the process of manipulating and formatting a print job, within a printer driver, prior to the job being printed. The Job Finishing function occurs after the application has submitted the print job to the driver/spooling process. Common Job Finishing features include booklet printing, scaling, multiple copies, collation, reverse ordering and handouts (N-up).

Software Imaging modular driver toolkits incorporate some of the most advanced Job Finishing features available in the industry, delivering highly sophisticated and customized print layout formatting.

Taking Full Advantage of Devices

OEMs may want to enable their users to create brochures or do short-run print jobs on the printer. Features such as "scaled booklet printing" available from within the driver job finishing function make this extremely easy. Users simply specify that they wish to create a booklet and the driver then does all of the required page ordering, scaling and layout transparently. If the printer has a binding function then this can also be easily automated without any additional user intervention. The user simply prints from their desktop and a bound booklet is automatically created. Hardware finishing functions can also be accessed in a similar seamless way.

Powerful, Flexible and Extensible

The Job Finishing systems provided by Software Imaging as part of the Sorcerer and CDA DDKs are highly extensible and very flexible. CDA Job Finishing is targeted at the needs of the "intelligent" PDL device and Sorcerer at the needs of the raster device. The following examples illustrate the power of the two solutions:

CDA - Parameter Setting

Using the parameterized approach offered by CDA, OEMs can deliver advanced job finishing options on the device or simulate them on the host. For example a CDA driver supporting a wide format device can deliver n-up formatting to very high levels such as 240-up. In production print environments multi-up repeat can be used to achieve repetitive output for applications such as packaging production.

Adding Value

As well as the standard Job Finishing functions provided by both systems, OEM developers can also develop specific call-back functions to allow for the drawing of borders, overlays and watermarks. Dialogs may also be added to physical pages where end-user instructions need to be included in order to support functions such as manual duplex.

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