The manufacturers said this new offering, which eliminates the need for manual data entry and setup of finishing information, allows for efficient, automated imposition layout and production from pre-press through the finishing stages, delivering precise throughput faster and saving up to 70% of setup time.

Duplo International product launch leader Peter Dyson said the integration would reduce human setup errors and enable users to quickly verify job designs with a visual preview of finishing lines before printing.

The integration connects Duplo’s multi-finishers to EFI’s Fiery Impose software, giving users an automatically generated, accurate preview of slit, cut, and crease locations in their printing jobs.

New layouts can also be saved as templates to automate imposition on future jobs. And, using Fiery Impose’s existing Duplo barcode support, users can load printed jobs directly into the DC-646 and DC-746 and let the finisher perform automatic setup for the job based on the barcode.

“With JDF finishers, a lot of work goes on at the front-end that doesn’t necessarily get through to the finisher. So the concept was that, for JDF to work correctly, the job has to be imposed and laid out to be compatible with the finishing machine,” said Dyson.

“So you need something built in to the imposition program that understands the limitations of the finishing machine, otherwise when the job gets to it there’s a gutter that’s too small, a crease that’s too wide or something that it can’t do.

“As all of that information is known and understood by the PC GUI that is used to program our machine, the concept was that if we create the job on the finisher and give that information to the imposition program as an XML file, it could then use that as the layout and then concentrate on the things the imposition program is good at – populating the page and putting in all the marks and information.

“But the actual key detail, which is where all the cuts and creases and perfs and everything should be, actually comes from the finisher. So the person that’s doing the imposition has to just pick up the XML plan and drop it into the imposition program and then it’s automatically populated and dynamically set up ready for printing.”

The new integration feature is available to customers free of charge from their local distributor through a firmware update delivered online for the DC-746’s PC Controller software. Support for the Duplo DC-646 is expected to be available from October.