Editor development in the Web2Print area of
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The past year has been a very exciting and thrilling one for us in the field of editor development. Expanding our customer base has given us the opportunity to gain interesting insights into new industries and, thanks to our customers' visions, to gain additional experience in the field of 3D visualization.

For the first version of our web-to-print editors, Adobe's Flash platform was our platform of choice. The deciding factor was the ability to implement editing functions, such as text or image manipulation, directly in the browser and to implement cross-browser development relatively easily. Native developments in the browser using HTML & JavaScript were basically feasible at that time, but the HTML standard did not yet meet our high requirements for developing a sufficiently powerful editor.

However, the introduction of mobile devices such as the iPhone and later the iPad from Apple heralded the gradual demise of Flash technology. Some of the reasons for this emerging trend were the poorer performance on tablets and smartphones and the comprehensive exclusion of Flash on all mobile devices from Apple. We therefore decided to discontinue the previous editor development based on Flash and switch completely to HTML5. Our focus was now primarily on implementing all the functions available in Flash using HTML and JavaScript and adapting them to the new development environment. In addition to taking into account the numerous browsers, our developers also had to contend with the switch from ActionScript (Flash) to JavaScript at the beginning. However, with new approaches, overcoming these natural hurdles was ultimately only a matter of time. Looking back, our consistent decision to rely on HTML5 for editor development was the only right one. The e-commerce sector and the associated product customization of mobile devices has become indispensable in its current form and is already considered standard by most consumers today.

The topic of 3D in Web2Print is a very hot one at the moment. Many consumers want to be able to "grasp" the product they have designed in the editor even better visually. In my opinion, there are some industries, depending on the complexity of the respective products, that can benefit more from this added value than others. The "packaging" sector is a prime example of this, as the option of using an additional 3D preview experienced a real boom there last year. We are seeing a trend here whereby more and more online printers are expanding their product portfolios to include the "packaging" category, and increasingly, independent portals dedicated to the topic of "packaging" are emerging. Although the focus is still mainly on the B2B sector, the B2C sector is also offering increasingly diverse opportunities to gain a foothold in this sector.

From a technological perspective, implementing a high-quality 3D preview in a browser is a major challenge. For this reason, it has not been easy to generate a real-time image of the product and then superimpose it onto a three-dimensional body. In order to make the best possible use of the technological possibilities here as well, we said goodbye to our previous editor last year and developed a completely new solution that is now also based on HTML5, but technologically relies entirely on the HTML5 Canvas element.

This HTML element can be easily imagined as a canvas on which text, shapes, and images can be placed. With the help of Canvas, we can now create an image of the customization and then place it directly over a corresponding 3D model. In addition to this, Canvas also offers us a number of other advantages. For one thing, we are no longer dependent on HTML for text functions, and for another, we can achieve improved editor performance by minimizing DOM elements.

In conclusion, I believe that we were able to take an important technological step forward last year and that our "printformer" is now ideally equipped to handle the many future trends in the areas of "web-to-print" and "mass customization."