(Watch the complementary webinar to this article here.)

Postpress is as integral to print production as the prepress and press stages, and in a business sense, it’s even more critical: only after it takes place does the printed matter turn into something that can be delivered to the customer as a finished job in functional (and billable) form. But despite the value it adds, clinging to postpress is its reputation for being the least automated, most labor intensive, and least profitable part of the print manufacturing sequence.

However, a review of recent advances in postpress technology marks that opinion as almost wholly obsolete. As these developments make clear, the digitization of print has not left postpress behind. Far from it. Where setting up a folder, for example, used to require a complicated set of manual adjustments, now the machine can take its instructions from XML feeds or bar codes.