PDF profiling for B&W versus color pages cost estimation for efficient on-demand book printing
Fabio Giannetti, Gary J. Dispoto, Rafael Dueire Lins, Gabriel de França Pereira e Silva, Alexis Cabeda · 2010
Today, the way books, magazines and newspapers are published is undergoing a democratic revolution. Digital Presses have enabled the on-demand model, which provides individuals with the opportunity to produce and publish their own books with very low upfront cost. With these new markets, opportunities, and challenges have arisen. In a traditional environment, black-and-white and color pages were printed using different presses. Later on, the book was assembled combining the pages accordingly. In a digital workflow all the pages are printed with the same press, although the page cost varies significantly between color and b/w pages. Having an accurate printing cost profiler for pdf-files is fundamental for the print-on-demand business, as jobs often have a mix of color and b/w pages. To meet the expectations of some of HP customers in the large Print Service Providers (PSPs) business, a profiler was developed which yielded a reasonable cost estimate. The industrial use of such a tool showed some discrepancies between estimated and printer log, however. The new profiler presented herein provides a more accurate account of pdf jobs to be printed. Tested on 79 "real world" pdf jobs, totaling 7,088 pages, the new profiler made only one page misclassification, while the previous one yielded 54 classification errors.