Talk:Variable data printing

Untitled
I think that there are other links posted as informational, why not DesignMerge.....DesignMerge is a variable data tool. There are several advantages to plug-in technology in the VDP space. The most important advantage is that the DesignMerge software can utilize the two most powerful and popular composition engines in the world, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. All of the composition features that you have grown accustomed to are fully supported by DesignMerge. Everything aspect of the composition process, including kerning and letterspacing, hyphenation and justification, runarounds, multi-page composition, styling, tables, etc. are all available for you to use. You just take an existing document, and use DesignMerge to "Make It Variable". Your variable output will look just like you did File/Print for each individual data record.

Appears there are loads more doing the same thing and calling it "VDP", but that is not my point. I miss "induvidualised data printing". After all "mailmerge" = "VDP"; right ?, but if you use data mining, geographical, cultural and other market relavent knowledge to adapt the "printed message" to suit an induvidual, well that's "IDP". And it takes a lot more than runarounds to make "IDP" work.

Example: travel (holiday) offers can be made in "one production run" that server: 1. young out-going folks (active holidays) 2. Folks with children still at school 3. Singles 5. Older well established folks (largers fonts, etc.) 6. .......

Takes a bit more that your average mailmerge VDP solution or is there one out there that can service this need today —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.148.237.54 (talk) 20:00, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Proposed merge from Mail merge
The article Mail merge is quite scant, and most of what it says is replicated here in Variable data printing, in more detail and with more concrete examples. I therefore propose that they are merged, or, at least, that sections be merged or moved between the articles. In my own mind I am not sure that merging the article wholesale is the best approach.

The two terms possibly overlap in use, and one could redirect one to the other, but "Mail merge" is probably the more common everyday term, and "variable data printing" the more technical term. I think that the "Variable Data Printing" article should concentrate on the high-volume printing aspects of the process, i.e. RIPs and so forth, as its title suggests. It should not be concerned with the reasons for its use (the sections "The consumer", "Benefits" and "Integration"), which may be better placed at Mail merge, although it is dealt with extensively at Advertising mail.

Obviously, variable data printing, and mail merge, have wider uses beyond advertising. So they are related but shouldn't be merged all into one.

But the marketing concerns are probably covered much better at Direct marketing anyway, so I would prefer that Mail merge and Variable data printing are merged, and the resulting article concentrates on the process (i.e. the software and hardware used for variable data printing/mail merging), as opposed to the business/marketing drivers for it.

GMC is one of the vdp tool — Preceding unsigned comment added by 183.82.102.249 (talk) 09:25, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

There is also the question of nomenclature; the "integration" section talks of using PURLs and so on, which has little do do with merging mail, and even less to do with printing. There are a couple of links to articles about PURLs at Purl (disambiguation), but none of them seems a good fit.

As a minor side issue, Mailshot seems to have been created as a stub out of the discussion at Talk:Mail_merge) and should probably be merged into Advertising mail. I've started a separated discussion for that at Talk:Mailshot.

Si Trew (talk) 08:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

I disagree with the above. It would perhaps be valid if mail merge were purely a software function, but it has hardware antecedents and software antecedents (such as WordPerfect) which are quite primitive compared with today's Variable data printing.deisenbe (talk) 23:11, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Broken links
Many of the links in the citations section are broken. I'm not in a position to fix this, perhaps some hardy soul could investigate?

Unsourced listcruft and spam removed
Wikipedia is not a product catalog (WP:NOTCATALOG) or repository of indiscriminate information. Lists must have clear inclusion criteria and be verifiable by independent sources. The original source is not a reliable source (WP:RS) (also copypasting significant parts of it into Wikipedia would be a copyright violation). A large number of entries have been added later without any sources. Aside from these problems this excessive list was also misused for systematic link spam and product promotion. I have removed it, but it's still available in the article's history (incase anyone wants to work on a policy-compliant sourced list of noteworthy entries). GermanJoe (talk) 11:55, 18 August 2018 (UTC)