Speculative document evaluation

Abstract

Optimisation of real world Variable Data printing (VDP) documents is a difficult problem because the interdependencies between layout functions may drastically reduce the number of invariant blocks that can be factored out for pre-rasterisation. This paper examines how speculative evaluation at an early stage in a document-preparation pipeline, provides a generic and effective method of optimising VDP documents that contain such interdependencies.Speculative evaluation will be at its most effective in speeding up print runs if sets of layout invariances can either be discovered automatically, or designed into the document at an early stage. In either case the expertise of the layout designer needs to be supplemented by expertise in exploiting potential invariances and also in predicting the effects of speculative evaluation on the caches used at various stages in the print production pipeline.

Optimized reprocessing of documents using stored processor state

“…Rather than generating a series of documents by fully evaluating with new instance data, it might be possible to treat each customised data instance as a series of edits to the previous instance. For sets of documents with a sufficient degree of commonality, this might well provide a method of efficiently generating instance documents without the need to perform aheadof-time optimizations such as those described in [12,13].…”