Chili Publish to unveil more functionality and partnerships at Drupa

Chili Publish will unveil the latest iteration of its online document editor Chili Publisher 3 at Drupa in Hall 7A (stand C15).

Chili Publish director Kevin Goeminne said the software developer was trying to avoid the label "inDesign in the cloud" as it continued to add greater functionality.

"The market is moving very fast and as such we want to be able to support our customers with the latest functionality," added managing partner Bram Verniest.

New features include the ability to use table structures for page layouts, where each cell can hold text, images, barcodes, vectors or tables, and Chili's second generation mobile reader.

Another addition to be announced in Dusseldorf is 3D Folding, a 3D visualisation tool to give printers and end-users a preview of what finished products will look like.

In addition to previewing folded paper documents, Chili said that the tool could be used to create previews of simple packaging products from the artwork and folding patterns.

Chili will also unveil its latest partnerships at Drupa, including a mystery deal with Agfa Graphics and a deal with Cronos Group-subsidiary PHPro, which has resulted in the development of a Chili connector for the popular e-commerce platform Magento.

"This combination allows graphical service providers to create webshops with online editing capabilities in a very short amount of time," said Verniest. "Since Magento is open source, based on PHP, and Chili Publisher hosts a very powerful API, shop-owners can now push the boundaries of web-based applications."

Integrating Chili Editor in Magento was straightforward, according to Jasper De Craecker, technical lead developer, PHPro. "Thanks to the well designed Chili API and detailed documentation made available in the Chili Backoffice, our developers were able to put together a proof of concept in Magento within a few days."