DaylightRIP solves printer problems

With its 156.000 inhabitants, the city of Apeldoorn in the Netherlands is, by Dutch standards, an average-sized town. Situated on the fringe of a large nature reserve, Apeldoorn has the reputation of being a very prosperous town, a characterisation which the generous sprawl of villas and gardens, as well as the proximity of a famous royal hunting lodge seem to confirm rather than contradict.

An important role in the city’s administration is played by the urban planning and information department, where its employees, using Bentley MicroStation and Adobe Illustrator, create street-maps, situation drawings and cadastral documents in various sizes. To print them, the department has three HP DesignJets (one 1050, one 1055 and a 755) at its disposal.

For some time these printers had been controlled by their Windows drivers. However, the Windows drivers showed their limitation when in 2002 a number of aerial photographs - processed in MicroStation - had to be printed. They were not capable of handling the vast amount of data these files contained, which resulted in lots of aborted print jobs and serious headaches.

The problem was solved as soon as SCP’s file-to-print software DaylightRIP was installed. Since that day, the Apeldoorn planning department has adjusted their workflow to the effect that all print jobs are sent to the printers via DaylightRIP.

However DaylightRIP offers more benefits than just fast data processing. “DaylightRIP made our complete print workflow more efficient and more productive”, says system administrator Mr. Rick Klooster. “Here’s a small example: when you use the Windows printer driver, you have to start a new print job for each print you want to make of a certain file. This is very cumbersome, especially if you need many copies. In DaylightRIP you just set the copy count, hit the print button, and that’s it”.

Mr. Klooster and his team are big fans of DaylightRIP’s user-friendliness and the software’s Client/Server architecture: “When we installed DaylightRIP, we set up the RIP server with several different RIP queues. Since then we have never needed to pay any more attention to it. From our workstations we simply send the print jobs to the RIP queue of our choice, or we print directly from the application via the PPD driver in DaylightRIP.” Using the spooling subsystem, the productivity gets an additional boost: the RIP server can transmit data faster, so the system is ready for the next print job sooner. Mr. Klooster: “This way our department is able to easily achieve a high throughput of about a hundred A0 prints per week and many more smaller-sized ones.”

Summarising, Mr. Klooster comments: “DaylightRIP works, as we call it ‘under water’. It’s always there but nobody sees it. We have never had any problems. That’s the big advantage of this system: you simply never notice it’s there!”