VersaWorks – CustomCut
Roland EcoSol printer predominantly use roll media. In the layout tab of VersaWorks you will see at the top under Media Settings a pulldown with “SIZE: CustomRoll” chosen by default. If the pulldown is engaged a user will find typical page sizes and roll settings that make little sense for the VersaWorks workflow. Pressing “Get Media Width” polls the printer for the actual available printable space on the roll width. Most every user know this.
Print/Cut Workflow: CustomCut is right above CustomRoll and is there to provide a Print/Cut workflow with added precision on multicopy jobs. Simpy put – if a job of 250 decals is needed – often a user will will make the queue setup for 25 copies (or a count that does not print out more than 3 feet of media) and repeat the job 5 times. This is often used to reduce the total job size so that the cutlines are more acurately aligned over the whole job. Roland created CustomCut to automate this procedure. Combine this with the “Configure Advanced Print Setting” in RVW6 Preferences – and jobs of 1000s can be Print/Cut with precise cut alignment. With more settings – even the take-up reel can be used to make this process unattended.
The process involves conceptualizing the job as pages. Copies are then placed on each page. Then many pages are propagated with decals and the job is sent. When sent – the job will: Print a page – Cut a page; Print a page – Cut a page, etc.
How are pages set up to do this? When CustomCut is chosen the height field next to the width field is made editable and a height can be entered. This height can be set to 2 or three rows of decals. As more decals are added – more pages are added when needed.
Step By Step:
- Load a roll of media and load the decal artwork into a queue and open the job settings.
- Press the “Get Media Width” button. Highlight the width polled – and press ctry-C to copy the number (The number could be written down as well.)
- Choose CustomCut from the pulldown – the width will change back to the maximaun and height will be set to 104″ This is why we copied the “Get Media Width” number. Pressing “Get Media Width” at this point will reset the dropdown to CustomRoll.
- Paste – ctrl-v – or write in the number for the width that was polled earlier.
- Take the graphic height and double or triple it and paste it into the height field.
- A page will now show on the screen with 1 object – propagate enoght copies so that the page is filled.
- The height can be tightened to rid the job of space – use the rearrange button to correct for over shrinking the page.
- Space between pages can be reduced in the Printer Controls tab – at the top – General-Use Custom Settings-Page Space. Set that to 0mm for Print/Cut or 10mm for Crop/Cut.
- Enter in as many total copies wanted and let VersaWorks propagate the number of pages up to 250 copy limit.
Crop/Cut Workflow: RVW6 has a new feature for TrueVis machines for Crop Cutting by allowing Crop/Cut Alignment Marks to be placed: Entire Area, For Each Row; For Each Data Entry. If RVW5 or older printers are being used – these function are not available. Using CustomCut will work just fine. The one trick is to set the page space to 10mm as mentioned above in 8. A page space of 0mm will place the Crop/Cut Alignment marks right next to each other making the optical eye mistake them as not individual.
Take-Up with TU2: Using the take-up reel involves making a page less than 13″ high (this keeps the print from hitting the floor) and using TU2 setting in the setup sheet procedure. TU2 stalls the take-up reel until the cutting fuction is complete. When both Print and Cut have completed – the printer will once again return to origing – kick the dancer bar – and slowly take up the currently finished page. A new origin is established and the procedure repeats itself.
The TU2 process involves loading to the take-up reel, but many enterprising operators have figured out how to use this process without prefeeding and wasting that length of media. That is for the user to explore.