Editor development in the Web2Print section of
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The past year has been both exciting and challenging for us in the field of editor development. As our client base expanded, we had the opportunity to gain valuable insights into new industries and, through our clients’ visions, gain additional experience in the field of 3D visualization.

For the first version of our web-to-print editor, 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 develop cross-browser compatibility relatively easily. While native browser development using HTML and JavaScript was technically feasible at the time, the HTML standard did not yet meet our high standards for developing a sufficiently powerful editor.

However, the introduction of mobile devices—such as Apple’s iPhone and, later, the iPad—heralded the gradual decline of Flash technology. Some of the reasons behind this trend included poorer performance on tablets and smartphones, as well as the complete exclusion of Flash from all Apple mobile devices. We therefore decided to transition our existing Flash-based editor development to HTML5. Our primary focus was now on implementing all functions available in Flash using HTML and JavaScript and adapting them to the new development environment. In addition to accommodating the numerous browsers, our developers also had to grapple with the transition from ActionScript (Flash) to JavaScript at the outset. However, thanks to 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 for mobile devices are now indispensable in their current form and are already considered standard by most consumers today.

The topic of 3D in Web2Print is a hot one right now. Many consumers want to be able to get an even better visual sense of the product they’ve designed in the editor. In my opinion, there are certain industries—depending on the complexity of their respective products—that can benefit more from this added value than others. The “packaging” sector is a prime example here, as the option to use an additional 3D preview experienced a veritable boom last year. We are observing a trend here where more and more online printers are expanding their product portfolios to include the “packaging” category, and standalone portals dedicated to the “packaging” sector are increasingly emerging. While the focus remains primarily on the B2B sector, the B2C sector is also offering increasingly diverse opportunities to gain a foothold in this industry.

From a technical standpoint, implementing a high-quality 3D preview in a browser poses a major challenge. For this reason, it has not been possible until now to generate a real-time image of the product and then overlay it onto a three-dimensional object. To make the most of the technological possibilities here as well, we phased out our previous editor last year and developed a completely new solution from the ground up, which now also relies on HTML5 but is built entirely around the HTML5 Canvas element.

You can think of this HTML element quite simply as a canvas on which text, shapes, and images can be placed. With the help of Canvas, we can now generate a representation of the customization and then overlay it directly onto a corresponding 3D model. In addition to this, Canvas offers us a number of other advantages. For one thing, we are no longer dependent on HTML for text functions as we were before, and for another, we can achieve improved editor performance by minimizing DOM elements.

In conclusion, I believe that we have made significant technological strides over the past year, and as a result, our “printformer” is ideally positioned to address the many future trends in the fields of “web-to-print” and “mass customization.”