Powered by a faster and higher performance 64-bit RIP engine, the developer said Flexi 19 has been designed to offer an increase in speed of more than 30% on its predecessor, delivering increased thrust to improve users’ production capabilities.
“We’ve had a lot of customers over the last few years ask for the 64-bit RIP engine,” said SAI director of worldwide marketing Michelle Johnson.
“It runs 30% faster than the previous version, which is something that those bigger production environments have needed.”
Flexi 19 has been created as an all-in-one package for design, print, print-and-cut and direct-to-vinyl production workflow. It comprises a raft of features including more than a dozen new additions.
One of the new design tools, Find my Font, can automatically identify a font (or the closest match) used in an image file.
Another new addition is the Pantone Fine-Tune Spot Colour Matching Tool, which SAI said is particularly useful for sign and display companies that regularly use Pantone books.
This allows users to measure charts and make manual adjustments to achieve precise colour matching from ICC profiles, saving time and ensuring colour accuracy.
New business-focused tools include Pulse, which delivers ‘data in a dashboard’, enabling sign and display users to track production and media usage of projects in progress via graphs and pie charts.
Additionally, Sidekick lets users create quotes, manage customer accounts, and ultimately implement a CRM workflow so that jobs can be quickly exported into the invoicing process.
Spot colour mapping, a feature that enables users to rapidly and accurately map spot/corporate colours in the design file to exact output values, has been enhanced for this release, as has profile wizard, which is designed to make it easier when setting ink limits and alleviating the process of splitting ink.
“We take value in what our customers tell us, and we keep a database of all of their suggestions, which we will look at when we’re going into a newer version,” said Johnson.
“A lot of that is simple tools on the design and production side that we can implement that help our customers to save time and improve their workflow.”
Flexi 19, which replaces predecessor Flexi 12, was first shown at the International Sign Expo in Las Vegas last month. The product is available via a subscription model, a traditional sales model (for users who bought the previous version outright) and through OEM partners.
Annual subscriptions for Flexi 19 are priced at £49.95 per month [or €49.95 per month] and subscription users will get it first, with rollout starting by the end of May. Pricing for purchasing the software outright was not available at the time of writing.
The Pulse and Find my Font features are free-of-charge to SAI subscription-based customers while Sidekick will be available as a paid subscription upon its summer release.
Flexi subscribers can also access SAI’s recently-introduced Sign Design Elements, a stock library of more than 6.5 million downloadable assets for the sign industry.
Fespa will take place at Messe Munich, Germany, from 14-17 May, with SAI exhibiting on booth A5-F31. The developer will also show its EnRoute and Box & Display software products on its stand.
