Adobe Output Designer is a WYSIWYG design tool that allows you to create electronic document templates for use with Adobe solutions for document generation. Using Output Designer, you can create electronic documents that exactly replicate existing paper documents — even the most complex — quickly and easily.

How it works

Output Designer is a full program. As such, the document template takes shape on the screen as it is drawn. All the features, such as text, fields, lines, boxes, and logos, and their attributes, such as fonts and shading, appear onscreen as they will when printed. User-defined grids enable the precise placement of graphics and text. Output Designer allows you to preview the presentation of your data to ensure that it is properly merged within the document template.

Output Designer supports dynamic sub forms, allowing the look and feel of the document to be dynamically controlled by the data. As a result, organisations can incorporate personalised messaging into customer documents to up sell additional products and services — all for a fraction of the printing and mailing costs typically associated with targeted marketing programs.

The design tool also allows you to create sophisticated, professional-looking customer documents quickly and easily while providing optimal flexibility in deploying these documents. Electronic document templates produced using Output Designer are for multi-platform use. Also, the Output Designer process produces printer macros that are used to significantly improve printing throughput. A single document design can be used with multiple printer types (for example, Adobe PostScript, PCL5, PCL-XL, Adobe PDF, etc.), and in each case printer language-specific macros are generated for optimum productivity.

With Output Designer's easy-to-use interface, formatting attributes on the document template are set using pop-up windows and drawing toolbars. They are easily moved, changed, added, or deleted using a mouse. No programming is required to make formatting or layout changes. As a result, budgets can be more profitably directed at maintaining the company’s data rather than at designing and maintaining documents.

Page sizes, font types, line spacing, justification, shading, logos, and bar codes are all specified within the template itself, which is independent of the application sending the data. Because formatting is stored in the template created by Output Designer and not in the application, only the data is transmitted across the network. The background graphics and text are transmitted to the printer only once. With no graphics being transmitted, this results in a significant reduction in network traffic and an increase in printer speed.

Adobe Output Designer highlights

• Supports dynamic sub forms, allowing data-driven document construction that can be personalised to individual customers
  
• Includes full font support, as well as support for shaded text, rotated text, variable leading, embedded logos, watermarks, and colour
  
• Supports most popular graphics formats including PCX, TIFF, WMF, PostScript, BMP, and JPG
  
• Supports most common bar code formats
  
• Supports multiple languages, including DBCS languages
  
• Available for Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP

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