Global Graphics has received the patent that underpins its Smart DFE Rip. This makes it difficult for other developers to replicate the technology that inventor Eric Worrall has used to create a Rip for high speed inkjet presses.
Worrall says: “Real time inline rasterisation of variable data for high speed digital presses poses a significant challenge, as it requires a very high constant rate of raster data to be delivered to the press.
“Unfortunately, the diversity of PDF files and computing hardware ensures that very complex jobs may process too slowly for inline rasterisation. Compounding this issue is the vast number of PDF creators in the market, who prioritise design flexibility without considering rasterisation or printing.
“Digital press operators have been forced to process jobs in advance—while their press sits idle—or to process jobs inline and hope that the DFE can provide data at the speed of the digital press. This risk has made the production use of inline Rips for high speed inkjet presses impractical until now.”
The Smart DFE harness artificial intelligence to both configure a Rip on the fly according to the different elements in a job file, for example how many images, number of pages and variable data fields. The Rip’s processing engine can be configured to assign the best arrangement of threads to handle each job. The AI will learn how an expected processing time compares to the actual processing time and feeding this back to improve configurations next time. That can either be done on site or in the cloud says the patent, giving OEM options about how they might deploy the Smart DFE technology.
It will optimise the 1,000 different PDF operations that press manufacturers need to cope with.
The nub of the issue laid out in the patent (11,720769 – Methods and systems for enhancing raster image processing using artificial intelligence) is: “Conventionally, a Rip configuration is chant to work for a range of print jobs and may be modified to specific hardware. However, when the hardware changes or a print job from a different source is received, the Rip may not be optimally or ideally configured. Often, with experimentation by an operator Rip configuration or the threads can be modified to optimise or enhance the operation of the Rip for the new hardware or print job. However, such experimentation can be time consuming or waste resources.”
This is what the implementation of artificial intelligence is intended to eliminate. “This is a very practical application of AI that solves long standing challenges in inkjet production printing,” says Worrall. “By applying this invention to the Harlequin Direct technology in Smart DFE, we have the first production quality solution for inline rasterisation on high speed digital presses.”
The patent was applied for in June 2021 and was granted last month.
