Meadows Publishing Solutions today announced the release of DesignMerge Pro for Adobe InDesign CS6, supporting both Macintosh and Windows-based platforms. DesignMerge Pro will provide Adobe InDesign users with sophisticated variable data publishing, personalized printing, and document automation features. The modules work within the InDesign application, enabling professional mail-merge, variable data printing, and document automation features. The entire process is database-driven, completely flexible, and very easy to use.
 
DesignMerge can easily support variable text, picture, article, and even complete InDesign layouts and master pages. All of the features of Adobe InDesign are available when using DesignMerge software, so advanced features such as variable type-on-a-curve are easily supported. DesignMerge also outputs the most popular variable data printing formats including PostScript, PPML, Creo VPS and PDF/VT. The product is fully compatible with systems offered by Canon, Creo, EFI, Fujifilm, HP, Konica-Minolta, and Ricoh, among others. For more information about DesignMerge technology, please visit www.designmerge.com/aboutplugins.  
 
New Features
 
This new release contains many new features, as well as enhancements to several existing features. The new features are available for the CS5, CS5.5 and CS6 versions of DesignMerge. For a complete summary of all new features, please visit http://www.meadowsps.com/designmerge50. Some of the more significant new features include the following:

• Direct PDF Output: DesignMerge now includes a new PDF Driver module that produces variable output in both PDF as well as PDF/VT formats. The DesignMerge PDF Driver allows you to select any InDesign PDF Export option for the output, and also provides many of the features that are available in the other DesignMerge Print Drivers, such as specifying a maximum number of Page Sets per Job and selecting a Post-Processing Destination. Full control over PDF file naming is also supported. In addition to standard PDF, the PDF Driver allows you to produce output in PDF/VT format, which is an optimized PDF format compatible with PDF-enabled digital print controllers and applications, such as the Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE). This new PDF format has been optimized for VDP applications.

• Embedded Variable Link Support: The processing capabilities of DesignMerge have been enhanced to include processing Variable Links that can be embedded directly in the data to be merged. This new feature is especially helpful for encoding verbose data formats such as MeCard and vCard formats, or for concatenating data fields such as Zip+4 and other postal codes.

• Enhanced Variable 2D Bar Code Support: In conjunction with Embedded Variable Link support, the MPS 2D Bar Code Module can now fully support verbose data formats such as the vCard format. The vCard format is used extensively in applications such as business cards where contact information must be fully encoded in QR Code format, allowing the data to be quickly scanned by smart phones and other QR Code reader applications.

• Enhanced Settings for PPML and Creo VPS Print Drivers: The PPML and Creo VPS Print Drivers have been enhanced to allow you to review and select the Data Format, Color, Transparency Flattener and other settings that the driver will utilize for the current merge session. The PPML driver has been additionally enhanced to provide separation of image data and "pass through" image support, resulting in faster processing and smaller output files.

• Print Preview Mode: Print Preview is a new type of Test merge session that you may run on any DesignMerge job. Print Preview has been specially designed to mimic exactly how the documents will be merged and printed.