Licensing for this product relies on a dongle that will be shipped to you, physically. The dongle should arrive within a few days after you place your order.
PrintShop Mail is a stand-alone desktop application for variable-data printing (sophisticated mail-merge). It allows you to add variable text, variable graphics, and variable bar codes to a blank page, PDF file, EPS file, or Microsoft Word file for the purpose of generating a batch of documents each of which is customized according to information in a database.
There are two versions of PrintShop Mail. One of them is this version,
PrintShop Mail Starter, which allows you to generate 100,000 documents; then it stops working unless you
buy more credits. The other version is
PrintShop Mail Production, which does not impose a limit on the number of documents you can generate.
The two versions operate in identical fashion except that PrintShop Mail Starter imposes a limit on the number of documents that can be generated, and PrintShop Mail Production does not.
PDF workflow saves time
PrintShop Mail's support for PDF allows you to use virtually any application to create your basic design (that is, your
master document). For example, you can use Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress or even Microsoft Word. Once you have your PDF file, just open it in PrintShop Mail and you're ready to use PrintShop Mail's drag-and-drop interface to start laying out your variable-data document.
Printing and output formats
You can print to any printer that has a Windows driver. Also, if your printer/RIP understands PostScript and/or understands any of several output formats designed specifically for variable-data printing, PrintShop Mail can take advantage of that to make your documents print faster.
Graphics support
For static and variable images, PrintShop Mail supports these formats:
Your data
PrintShop Mail supports the following data formats for your data (typically this is a name-and-address list, but it can be virtually any kind of data):
- dBase (.dbf)
- Microsoft FoxPro (.dbf)
- Paradox (.db)
- Microsoft Excel (.xls)
- delimited ASCII (.csv, .txt)
PrintShop Mail also supports ODBC, so you can connect directly to your database system if you want to.
PrintShop Mail displays the structure of your data on the screen for you, right next to a representation of the document you are creating. Just click on a data field and drag it to use the data in your document.
You can use your data as-is in your documents, as variable text; or you can use PrintShop Mail conditional-processing features and various other features to instruct PrintShop Mail to make on-the-fly decisions about what to include in each document.
Import RTF files and Word (.doc) files
You can store formatted text in .rtf files and .doc files and use the files in your variable-data documents.
Bar codes, symbologies
PrintShop Mail has built-in support for various types of bar codes/symbologies. It supports one-dimensional bar codes such as UPC/EAN, Code 128, Interleaved 2 of 5, POSTNET, Intelligent Mail, and more. It also supports various two-dimensional (2D) symbologies: DataMatrix, PDF417, QR Code, more.
Oversets
PrintShop Mail can handle text oversets by re-sizing text automatically to fit a designated area and/or by flowing text automatically from one area to another area.
Whitespace management
You can suppress unwanted whitespace in a situation where a data field is empty.
Serialization
PrintShop Mail supports page numbering, Bates numbering, crash numbering, other serialization tasks.
Imposition
PrintShop Mail supports layout repetition (n-up) with optional stack sorting.
Languages
PrintShop Mail supports English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, and Arabic.