Yours Truly Designer for HP Indigo

[Lefkoff]

I work as a designer for an ad agency. We do not do any variable date printing yet. I'm surprised that we haven't done any. Anyway, I was at our print shop the other day doing a press check and went through the prepress department. They were setting up an InDesign CS3 document to be printed on an Indigo using HP's Yours Truly Designer plug-in for InDesign.

Where could I learn more about Your Truly Designer? I have tried the HP site, but it sucks. It is impossible to find anything of value on it. Since I think variable data is the future, like it or not, I would at least like to learn more about it. Any help would be appreciated.

[PrepressCrapFixer]

When we bought our Indigo about 4 years ago, they sent me to Boston for training on Yours Truly Designer which was helpful since the user guide is quite difficult to follow unless you have some knowledge of VDP.  I have a PDF of the user guide for version 6.5 which probably won't be much help for you at this point.  You might try http://www.dscoop.org/ which has a discussion forum for HP Indigo users.  You should have gotten a user name and password from HP when you bought the press. 

Personally I don't like YTD.  Shortly after we started doing VDP jobs we bought a copy of FusionPro so we could work on some files that originated from Indesign. (when we started they didn't have an Indy pluggin yet) I really liked it and haven't used YTD for quite some time now.  I would suggest you check into FusionPro as an alternative to YTD.  Go here:  http://www.printable.com/solutions/fusionpro/

I hope this helps,

[Slappy]

I don't think Lefkoff is a press-owner, so they won't have access to DScoop, or any of the Official HP materials. I thought there was a Designer's version of YTD available though, and you should be able to get your hands on that fairly easily. Problem is, YTD is used exclusively for Indigo presses, so it's going to have a limited use to most designers.

Lefkoff, your best bet is to find out which packages your vendors are using for their particular presses, then inquire if there are "design only" versions you can install. Most major VDP vendors have that freely available.

If you can't locate the YTD version, I'll look around the HP Site for you, just ask!

[Exploded]

I use YTD with CS3 evey day, what do you want to know? The plugin is free but is limited to 100 personalised files and is only about $300 for a site licence. Is is also very handy for imposing files for the indigo.

[The Stevinator]

YTD sucks ass.  It wont even do you any good really unless you have an indigo or some other digital press that can take JLT/PPML/or optimized PDF.

[Slappy]

They were setting up an InDesign CS3 document to be printed on an Indigo using HP's Yours Truly Designer plug-in for InDesign.

I think that's the OP's intent - to learn the software their vendor is using. YTD isn't much above entry-level it's true - but if that's what they want, we're but here to serve.

Lefkoff, what say you?

[The Stevinator]

if anyone does use YTD, they should be using the quark version.  it's more robust.  which is funny when your talking about YTD....

anyhow funny story.  when they updated a version of YTD we had an indichrome job that came in.  so, i output the JLT, no problem send to press and it processes as 4 color.  every time.  i called hp, and it turns out nobody testing that freaking button before releasing!  i really hate those people sometimes.

[Slappy]

Yeah, I only have a Beta version of YTD installed on CS2. It was kinda leaked on the HP site before it was supposed to release, and I grabbed it a while ago. I use it when I have to, but I don't think they ever got the ID version polished enough to warrant me getting a paid version.