PPML - Reusable Content

Reusable Content

The traditional printer languages retrieve a page, examine what is on it and start to create rasterized images to tell the printer what is where and how it should be put on paper. This is repeated for every single page. High-volume printjobs easily contain tens of thousands of pages that all have to be RIPped. RIPping can become a problem if one realizes that a page with a color photo and a logo can reach a size of as much as 20 MB in PostScript. This costs an exceptional amount of processing power and memory space and is the most important cause of print processes running aground. This is why rated engine speeds are often not met and machines may be RIPping all night to be able to produce at a reasonable speed during the day.

This bottleneck in printing can be solved by specifying reusable content. Reusable content are things that are used on many of the pages. Reusable content can be fonts (letter types), logos (in all sorts of formats), signatures (for policies), diagrams (research results), images (advertising) and the like. An object that is reusable is often called a resource. PPML was designed to make this reuse of resources explicit and allows the printer to know which resources are needed at a particular point in the job. This allows a resource to be rasterized once and used many times instead of being rasterized on every page on which it is used.