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  1. #1
    Senior Member webtrekker's Avatar
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    Easy Personalised Print & Cut Manager ...

    I'll try to keep this short and easy to follow.


    The issue. My daughter sells various printed items, some personalised, and wanted an easier, more efficient way of producing certain items for print & cut that require personalised text. She's got a good head for selling but is not technically-minded and knows no coding languages.


    The concept. So, I got to thinking that I could code a web app (written in PHP and using the FPDF extension) to enable her to simply input a design number for the image required, a line or two of text, and at the click of a button a PDF file would be produced complete with the required image, registration marks, and formatted personalised text, all ready for printing and cutting.


    The result. We now have a working app that runs inside any web browser, anywhere, that allows us to retrieve any of our designs from our web server and produces a PDF ready to print & cut.


    Here are a few screenshots of the process, in this case producing personalised labels for Xmas sweet tubs which we print on glossy sticker paper for the customer to apply to their own sweet tubs ...




    1. The end product as advertised by us.








    2. The app interface running in the browser.








    3. The resulting PDF after clicking the yellow 'Print' button, with Reg Marks ready for printing out and contour cutting.








    4. The finished item.







    This method could be applied to all manner of items requiring personalised text such as JPSS and 3gJET-OPAQUE t-shirt transfers, etc. We use it A LOT on various different products and it has never let us down. The PHP code is very short and, as stated above, uses the FPDF extension for producing the PDF with image and text. No point in reinventing the wheel, as they say!

  2. #2
    Super Moderator Paul's Avatar
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    this could be done in illustrator with ready mace template and actions.
    If you are really fancy to create code for anything you can think off, go ahead. But I believe those things can all be done already with very little work. I have all my items already prepared. All I do is just insert the image and all done. cutlines are ready. I sometimes need to readjust width or heigh of the image as not all photographs/logos fit correctly so not sure how you would sort this out if all is done on full auto?
    Last edited by Paul; 20-12-2021 at 02:54 PM.

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  4. #3
    Senior Member webtrekker's Avatar
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    Hi Paul Thanks for the reply.

    Yes, you're right, templates are very useful too and I use them myself but, as mentioned, most of this work is for my daughter's business and she's just not into Ai, Photoshop, or any graphics software really. (One day, ... maybe!).

    I'm knocking 70 now and won't always be around to help her out so I'm trying to automate as much of it as I can, both to cover for her lack of knowledge in this area and to speed things up as she gets many different orders each day.

    A few other pro's are:


    • No software is required, other than the cutter software needed for the final cut. (She knows how to handle the cutter).
    • Everything runs on a web server so can be run on any computer anywhere in the world.
    • Scaling and distortion of images is done automatically by the PHP ImageMagick routines I've written.
    • No costly subscriptions or high prices for software are needed. As long as the web hosting fees are paid (which we pay anyway for our websites we're developing) then it's free forever.


    I've been down the Photoshop and Ai route many times before and it becomes cumbersome, with huge files building up, as the number of images increases. You still need to handle layers and do image-sizing, text placement, etc for each image, particularly if personalisation is offered. We don't use customers own images or logos so that's not a problem for us. We only use our own designs.

    However, there's no one-size-fits-all solution so it's each to their own, dependant upon whatever skills they possess.

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