Variable Data Printing

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Starting with version 5.5.0, XF Rendering Server (Ultrascale Edition) supports Variable Data Printing (or VDP).

 

What is VDP?

VDP attempts to preserve regions of a page that don't change (are static in nature) in a cache and reuse this information instead of drawing this static content over and over again.

For example, a document can have headers and footers that don't change from one page to another. In this case, the whole header can be stored in the cache as a resource. Instead of drawing the headers for each page, the rendering engine will draw the headers in a resource only once and the resource will be then invoked for each page (like a function call). All major printing output formats support this feature (PDF, AFP and Postscript).

 

In XF Rendering Server, when VDP is enabled for a document, the server will automatically place a page's content in 2 categories: static content and dynamic content.

Static content will be cached as a resource and every time an identical content is detected, the renderer will use this resource instead of drawing the identical content all over again.

 

The elements which are considered to be dynamic are:

oIntrinsically dynamic elements from XSL-FO like fo:page-number and fo:page-number-citation
oData from source XML when input is XFD + XML
oAny other object with xf:vdp-variable set to true (see below).

 

By default, all other formatting objects are assumed to be static.

 

To enable VDP for the current document, the Enable VDP button located in the Printing group under the Review tab must be selected.

 

vdp_ribbon

 

The static and dynamic contents will be automatically detected for the XFD templates. The preview is available at any time in Print Layout view mode.

An example on how to enable VDP and view VDP content is provided under the How To section.

 

Note: For more information on VDP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_data_printing