Boston, Massachusetts and Appenzell, Switzerland – GMC Software Technology, the standard in personalized communication, today announced a new release of its popular PrintNet Designer software.

PrintNet Designer enables rapid creation and production of complex personalized documents for transpromo, direct marketing, on-demand publishing, customer correspondence and transactional applications. With PrintNet Designer Version 5.3, users can enjoy new feature advancements for consolidating print streams, creating Web content, and extending color management and quality control.

"Based on feedback from our customers and prospects we continue to evolve GMC's PrintNet software, placing it in a leadership position for the composition, management and production of the widest range of personalized documents," said Dr. René Müller, CEO of GMC Software Technology. "With PrintNet 5.3, our efforts have been centered on exciting features that address many industry issues and deliver extensive improvements in productivity for our customers."

New PrintNet Designer 5.3 highlights include:

Advanced Transformation Functionality
The ability to repurpose spooled print files, when the application that created the file is no longer available, has brought significant productivity savings to end-users. While earlier versions of PrintNet Designer contained features for repurposing legacy content from spooled print files, PrintNet Designer 5.3 makes the definition of data extraction areas fully visual with an integrated display of what was extracted from the legacy file. Users benefit from enhanced performance over earlier versions as well as the ability to modernize existing applications without having access to the original composition tools and content. Data streams supported include AFP, PDF, PostScript and TNO.

Enhanced HTML Output
Electronic delivery of personalized documents, via Personalize URLs (PURLs) or e-mail, is becoming an alternative to printed output. Enhancements to the PrintNet Designer 5.3 production engine allow the electronic display of any document that has been designed in PrintNet Designer. This includes advanced page formatting to support data driven graphs, tables and images as well as fonts and background elements. Ideally, these enhancements are best suited for applications that are viewed via a Web browser, while PrintNet Designer 5.3 will continue to support HTML output designed for e-mail clients as well.

Color Spectrophotometer Support
Color spectrophotometers measure specific colors using precision optics and calibrated light sources. RGB, CMYK and even named sources such as Pantone, use averages which are only valid for one paper stock and printed on a specific device. With PrintNet 5.3, color can now be captured directly by using an XRite color spectrophotometer allowing color settings to be calculated directly from a live printed sample.

PrintNet Designer 5.3 is available for shipment today. Current PrintNet Designer users should contact their local office to schedule upgrades.