CHICAGO----Oct. 16, 2006-- Bitstream Inc. announced today that is has shipped the most robust variable data publishing solution available on the market today: Pageflex 5.0. This latest release from the Pageflex product line means that anyone involved with variable data publishing -- from small printers producing stationery and business cards to high-volume shops running Web-to-print, 24x7 operations -- can possess the functionality they need to produce a wide range of variable jobs, all from one application. Pageflex 5.0 replaces the company's Mpower and .EDIT products and incorporates all of the capabilities of these server-based products into one modular application, and includes important new features designed to improve workflow, enhance design and document manipulation, and provide support for mission critical environments. Bitstream President and CEO Anna Chagnon comments on this latest Pageflex release by saying: "We developed Pageflex 5.0 to support a growing demand from the marketplace for a comprehensive variable data publishing solution. In this increasingly competitive marketplace, the printers and marketers who succeed in providing variable data services are the ones who can adapt quickly to their customers' changing requirements. Pageflex 5.0 enables companies to offer solutions that are flexible enough to serve the immediate needs of their customers, while making it easy for them to expand their variable data services in the future." Anna Chagnon continues, "Bitstream has always been committed to listening to our customers' needs and developing the best variable data publishing technology to meet those needs. The release of Pageflex 5.0 continues with that commitment by offering customers a robust, feature-packed solution with innovative capabilities all in one modular application. We are proud of this release and the positive impact it will have on our customers' ability to further develop their businesses." Upon previewing the Pageflex 5.0 product, Frank Romano, professor emeritus, School of Print Media at Rochester Institute of Technology, observed that the product's wide ranging and robust functionality sets the bar that every other VDP software company needs to work to achieve. Romano is author of the monthly Digital Printing Report from Printing Industries of America/Graphic Arts Technical Foundation and one of the most respected consultants, authors, and educators in the graphic arts industry. Romano declared that, "Pageflex is THE most powerful variable data product in the industry." Flexible Modules Pageflex 5.0 brings the full spectrum of variable publishing capabilities into one application, and offers them to users as flexible, optional modules, including: -- Form-Driven Customization -- Customized and personalized document creation and preview using a Web form. -- Data Merge -- Customized and personalized document creation using a database. -- Online Design and Editing -- Customized and personalized document creation using an online application. This module utilizes .EDIT technology to enable end users to interactively use desktop publishing capabilities directly in their Web browser. -- Cross Media -- Customized and personalized cross media campaigns using a database or Web form to produce print, HTML email, personalized URLs, landing pages, and Web microsites. New Features In addition to the modular architecture, Pageflex 5.0 introduces new features that provide enhanced design and document manipulation tools; and streamlined print production workflows; support for high volume environments. Together, these new capabilities provide the infrastructure necessary to host an automated 24x7, "lights out" VDP business. The product also includes all capabilities previously released in the prior Mpower and .EDIT products, as well as the ability to output documents in PostScript, Optimized PostScript, Adobe PDF, EPS, HTML, GIF, JPEG, PPML, JLYT, VPS, VDX, and VIPP. Enhanced Design and Document Manipulation Capabilities -- Document Actions -- A very powerful set of capabilities that enable every aspect of the document to be manipulated on the fly. This unique capability goes beyond the traditional use of variable data for modifying text and images and surpasses what other publishing applications on the market allow. Document Actions use scripts to directly access and manipulate the content, style, or layout of any document and then modify fonts, colors, shapes, attributes, pages, and any variable values or text as desired -- Global Copyfit -- Pageflex takes traditional variable data copyfitting to a new level of professionalism by allowing users to designate a set of text containers in a document that all need to maintain the same type settings (font size, leading, tracking, etc.) as any container in the set that is copyfitted. -- Enhanced Design Tools -- New capabilities for both the desktop Pageflex Studio and the interactive online editing components. These enhancements include the ability to have static or variable text on a curved path, full support for Bezier paths, a hand tool for panning the page, and the addition of guides and grids to the interactive online editing interface. Workflow -- The ability to batch jobs with many variable records into a series of smaller jobs -- The ability to assign paper trays on a press to individual document pages so that multiple stocks or pre-printed sheets can be co-mingled within a document -- Step-and-repeat and cut-and-stack imposition options enabling one record or multiple records to be automatically imposed on a press sheet -- substantial speed improvements in several aspects of the online interactive editing interface Support for High-Volume Environments -- New capabilities include built-in load balancing and failover across multiple servers; -- Support for multiple job queues enabling concurrent job processing, batching, and priority processing -- Centralized server administration with logging and reporting improvements. Advance Praise for Pageflex 5.0 "Pageflex listened to our needs and provided us with Pageflex 5.0, their best software upgrade to date. The logic in administration and document actions takes the product up to a completely new level of usage and is a major step for administrators, programmers, and designers to gain total control (of a document) at all levels. Forget painful configuration of your server. The installation process of Pageflex 5.0 is just as easy as setting up an e-mail account. We are now able to offer customers solutions to their most demanding requests." -- Havard Reinertsen of Mediaflex AS, Norway "The Pageflex Mpower product has always been critical to expresscopy's business. With the enterprise-class features incorporated into the new release of the Pageflex 5.0, I am convinced that it can meet our current needs and scale to support expresscopy.com's future growth." -- Chris Dailey, expersscopy.com, United States "At Four51 we run thousands of jobs daily, so maintaining up-time is critical for us. We are excited about the features released in Pageflex 5.0 that support high-volume environments like ours, including the built-in load balancing and failover across multiple servers." -- John Waangard, Four51's chief technology officer, United States Bitstream is demonstrating the capabilities of this new release in booth number 4846 of the Graph Expo trade show currently being held at the McCormick Conference Center in Chicago, Illinois.