Tilia Labs secures two new patents

The first patent, ‘Printer to die-cutter media size shift’, enables the automatic optimization of planning and impositioning for die-cut print orders that involve printing onto media that is substantially larger than the dies being utilized. In these scenarios, planners will want to take advantage of the larger area to combine multiple dies onto a single print form or to combine die-cut with non-die-cut items. Both processes are relatively common production techniques that are not directly supported by existing imposition or planning software.

According to Tilia Labs, these production techniques present significant challenges for print converters during the estimation, planning, and impositioning of print orders since they involve multiple cutting steps using different devices such as guillotine cutters and flatbed die cutters. Phoenix package models all printing, cutting, and other devices and utilizes this data in its award-winning Imposition AI module to automatically generate optimized plans covering all steps of the production process, including these multi-cutting scenarios.

The second patent, ‘Method for multifunctional graphical user interface file Indicia movement, and system, terminal and computer-readable media for the same’, covers a novel user interface design invention codenamed ‘drop scenarios’ that results in significant productivity boosts when operating interactively with tilia Phoenix for several everyday use cases.  

Introduced in tilia Phoenix’s 8.0 release, when users drag files into tilia Phoenix, an overlay displays default behavior and, in many cases, provides alternative actions to perform. These actions can be selected as part of the same drag-and-drop action by dragging the file(s) into designated regions within the overlay. Furthermore, multiple actions can now be performed when two or more file types are simultaneously dragged into Phoenix to automate common tasks like placing a die template and snapping artwork files into it or importing a spreadsheet and assigning artwork files to products by filename.  

‘The two issued patents further demonstrate our commitment to innovation through disruptive technologies for the industry,’ commented Scott More, co-founder and CTO at Tilia Labs. ‘We are very pleased with the current version of our flagship product, tilia Phoenix, but our team’s ideas, led by customer feedback, provide a number of ideas to continue to enhance the solution. As long as our customers utilize manual pre-press tasks and continue to run into hurdles during their pre-production processes, our solutions have room to grow.’