SignUp a tool for optimizing media by effective nesting.
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When a sign shop is given the task of printing a big quantity of images, the way images are placed in a board will directly affect the quantity of boards used in such a project. At the same time, the more boards are used, the higher cost and time of the print job.
This means that to take advantage of the whole board, the designer would need to dedicate considerable amounts of time placing each image so that the less possible space is wasted.
Esko is known in the print industry for producing XY cutters, but the range of products has been expanded to software tools, some of which assist print businesses in avoiding such wastes.
Esko SignUp
This is a nesting application for media optimization. Although some RIPs already offer nesting capabilities, their nesting is done with the imaginary square boxes your images are contained into. The advantage of SignUp software is that the nesting is done by rotating each image whenever necessary to take advantage of white spaces where possible. This means the nesting is not done in perfect X-Y axis but in multi-axis form.
SignUp displays a window where you get the images to be nested, and a number of parameter fields (color mode, quantity, file type, etc) per image. Some of these image properties can be modified. For example, you can increase the number of copies of an image to be nested in your board.
Because this software was created to assist the printing-cutting process, you can also modify the bleed by increasing it or decreasing it. For example, a bleed of -0.05cm will cut 0.05cm inside the borders of your image. You can also modify the gutter in your board, that is, the space between each image.
Depending on your computer, SignUp will take less than a minute to find the most appropriate way to place your images in such a way that the waste of media is reduced.
There have been print jobs where media usage has been reduced from 60 to 40 boards. This is summed up as a 30% reduction on media usage in a span of a minute.
First posted January 2010.
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We are adding new pages and new features every month so it is not always realistic to update old pages from past years. All the old equipment is still available on eBay, so we keep even our old pages. If you wish only the more up to date product reviews, these are in PDFs (not in the web pages, but in PDFs which are linked in the columns at the right of every page). Please realize that we tend to update a page (or a PDF) primarily when it is clear that our readers ask about this brand or model frequently. With over 45 brands of UV printers and over 200 models in the past ten years, it is not realistic to update pages on obsolete brands or unpopular models. If you prefer to speak with Nicholas Hellmuth in person about a printer, you can bring him to your company anywhere in the world as consultant. By later in 2012 more of our web sites will be in 36 different languages with instant translation (and better than old fashioned web page translators of several years ago). So far all the languages are available on www.FLAAR.org and www.3d-scanners-3d-software-reviews.org. Next will be our www.large-format-printers.org. |
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