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Fascicular Printing:

Documents Composed and Printed One Page at a Time

INTRODUCTION

Laser printing was the first technology available for composing and printing pages one at a time. Now that inkjet, and more recently, electron beam printing have become significant in composing and printing documents one page at a time, a more general term would be useful to describe this type of printing. The term fascicular printing is available from antiquity, and may be useful to distinguish this type of printing from duplication on a printing press.

(In the middle ages, books were copied by hand. To increase the number of copies of a book that could be made at the same time, books were divided into fascicles of a few pages each. The size of the fascicles was chosen to facilitate the coping process and had nothing to do with the content of the book being copied.)

Current Fascicular Printing Technology

The Scitex (http://www.Scitex.com) MPS42 is a 21 hundred page per minute color inkjet printer. The Xerox (www.Xerox.com) DocuPrint 1300 is an electron beam printer rated at 13 hundred pages per minute. The electron beam technology introduced with the DocuPrint 1300 appears to have the capability to be incorporated in printers that can easily produce over 4 thousand pages per minute. The introduction of these two devices weighs in on the side of an increase in paper usage in the future. Also, with the introduction of a 2 thousand page per minute color printer, the need for color scanning will probably increase.

High Speed Fascicular Printing

High Speed (1 thousand pages per minute) fascicular printing is being used to print documents that have traditionally been produced by in- house or contracted print shops. These documents are becoming increasingly personalized, and are also growing in number of pages and in frequency of distribution. Manuals, such as equipment and procedure manuals, and forms are printed on the day they are requested so that update pages do not have to be inserted into preprinted (and almost immediately obsolete) off-the-shelf copies. Insurance contracts are printed along with the insured’s name and any restrictions that may apply, eliminating both the need to update obsolete preprinted forms and also personalizing the forms to the individual insureds. Direct mail includes the most current offers and is personalized to the demographics of the recipients.

Xplor, a Fascicular Printing Association

Xplor International (www.Xplor.org) is a worldwide association with more than 5 thousand members and more than 29 hundred organizations that develop and use the technology of the US$ 125 billion document systems industry. Xplor is the largest organization for managing and printing of fascicled documents (printed and composed one page at a time) on high-speed (over 1 thousand pages per minute) printing systems. Xplor is one of the many information-centric organizations making a contribution to document management.

Xplor’s vendor organization members manufacture and sell the equipment to produce high quality, fine tuned documents, in high volume. Xplor members manage these documents during the production process. The members of ARMA International (The Association of Records Managers and Administrators) (www.ARMA.org) and other information-centric professional organizations then manage these documents after the production process.

The Xplor 99 Show had many exhibits and conference sessions on document production systems and the management of those systems and documents. Knowledge Management was well represented in the presentations with a Keynote address by Tomas Koulopoulos, President, and Carl Frappaolo, EVP, of the Delphi Group and a half-day tutorial on Knowledge Management by Mark Tucker, Senior Consultant, of the Delphi Group. Document capture, archiving, indexing, and viewing were covered in several sessions. Doculabs presented a full day curriculum on EBPP (Electronic bill Presentment and Payment). The Internet, intranets, and extranets were presented along with document communications formats such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) that facilitate the fasciculation of documents. Details of black and white and color printing were explained. Management education at all levels was also available in many sessions.

Now in its 20th year, the Xplor show continued its record of strong technical, document management, and business management presentations and exhibits.

California Local Gov. Retention Guidelines and Other Free Books	White Papers	Archive Builders Home Page	Site Summary Sheet	Entire Site In One PDF File
Available and Past Courses	Copies of Presentation Handouts	Upcoming and Past Presentations	For Questions About the Industry	Site Revision History