RIP question re: cut marks

[garisimo]

Hello peeps -- I am in the first stages of evaluating rips and large format printers, and am curious if any of the rip packages out there can do this:

Let's say I have a single instance of a business card and save it in a format the rip can process (PDF, EPS, etc.) -- can I instruct the rip to step and repeat the instance x by y and add the appropriate cut marks on the outside perimeter only? I have attached a sample graphic to illustrate this better.

Also, does Onyx or Caldera provide variable data solutions for their rips, so that I could pull numbering or text from an Excel/tab-delimited file and populate at the rip stage? I know that Wasatch has a module for this, but am not sure about the other two.

Thank for any help!

-g-

 

[signswi]

You can auto tile and nest in both Onyx and Caldera but I'm not sure if you can add offset crop marks like that automatically. However if you say exported your file with crop marks, it would naturally have the crops on each item that was tiled and nested. That's what we do (all PDF workflow).

Don't have experience with variable rip-side, we generally do it in indesign before the pdf export. Someone else may be able to answer that.

 

[garisimo]

Thanks signswi,

That's how I've been dealing with cut marks and variable data now (Illustrator, InDesign) but I saw a demo of the Wasatch variable data plug-in and was impressed by the seeming flexibility and advanced options as compared to ID variable data, such as being able to compress text to fit a field, add bar codes, and numbering. Unfortunately, Wasatch doesn't run the printers I am reviewing.

I also like Wasatch's crystal clear pricing (x for the software, y for this plug-in, etc.) -- refreshing.

Maybe I need to think about a different printer. ;(

-g

p.s. try winking while frowning -- it is wierd.