FROM PRODUCTION
When people say print automation, they usually mean a whole production line. A small shop does not need a line. It needs to stop retyping names, and that is something else entirely.
An order for fifty jerseys comes in. Heating up the calander takes a few minutes, pressing the motif onto the fabric takes a few more. The time goes somewhere else: preparing fifty files, each with a different name and a different number, and naming them so that you can find your way around them afterwards.
With five pieces you knock it out without noticing. With fifty it is an afternoon. With six hundred it is days of work, and above all it is work where mistakes creep in. Not because it is hard, but because it is dull and always the same.
And the mistakes repeat themselves. Digits swapped in two-digit numbers. The right name dropped into the wrong size. None of it is a disaster until it happens on an order that has to ship tomorrow.
Automation makes sense here. Just not at the machine, at the data.
Screen printing does not suit jerseys with names and numbers, and it is worth saying why. Screen printing makes a hundred identical pieces cheaply, because you prepare the screen once and then you just print. With personalisation every piece is different. Either you make a screen for every name, which makes no sense, or you print a hundred identical jerseys and stick the names and numbers on by hand. And you are back at the work you wanted to get rid of.
That is why it is done digitally, most often by transfer. The motif is printed onto paper and the calander presses it into the fabric. This is called sublimation printing and it works on polyester, which is what sports jerseys are made of.
There are other routes, printing onto film or cutting heat transfer vinyl. They have one thing in common: every piece can be different, because the machine prints what it gets in the file. Which brings us back to who prepares those files.
For large operations there are systems called workflow servers. One sits between the order system and the machines. It takes the order, prepares the data, separates the colours, lays the motifs out on sheets and sends them to the printer and the cutter. The operator steps in only when something does not add up.
It is well thought out and in a shop running thousands of pieces a day it pays for itself. But it comes with two conditions. You need an order system it can draw from, and you need somebody to set the server up and keep it running. It is sold as a subscription and you pay per user and per volume, so it does not grow with your shop for free.
If you have that, you can stop reading. The rest of the article is for everyone else.
A script does one single thing out of that whole chain, but the one that annoys a small shop most. It takes a template, takes a spreadsheet and turns them into finished print-ready PDFs. One per row, named from the data.
That naming sounds like a detail and it is not. When a file is named after the player and the size, you recognise it straight from the list. When it is named by sequence, you have to open it to see whose it is, and with a hundred pieces that is a hundred pointless openings.
It runs inside the program you draw the template in anyway. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing runs in the background and nothing is configured outside your own computer.
Whether the PDF then goes to sublimation, to film or to a cutting plotter makes no difference to the script. The output is the same, everyone just sends it somewhere else.
It does not separate colours and it does not lay motifs out on sheets. It does not drive the cutter or the calander. It does not talk to your web shop, so it has no idea which order is paid for. And it will not spot that you mistyped a size in the spreadsheet. What is in the spreadsheet is what ends up on the jersey.
Put simply, the script prepares your data. What happens to it after that is down to you and your machines.
That also tells you when the script stops being enough. Once you want the data to arrive from the order system on its own and the machines to know what is already finished, you need something else. That is not a shortcoming of the script, it is a different job.
Illustrator or CorelDRAW, whichever you draw the template in. A spreadsheet, exported from Excel if you like. And named text fields in the template, so the script knows where to put what.
That naming is the only extra work compared with doing it by hand. On one template it takes a few minutes and then it does not come back, because the template carries over to the next order. Anyone doing jerseys regularly sets it up once a season.
I only have one set of numbers and they are not mine, which is their advantage. A customer’s graphic designer wrote down the times on an order of 680 pieces. The export itself ran for one hour and four minutes.
The preparation around it took eight and a half hours. Drawing the artwork out into the sizes, downloading and preparing the optional graphics, sorting the spreadsheets and the files for the cut. Plus checking the finished data, which she did as she went.
The ratio is the interesting part. The script shortened a single item on that list. The rest stayed, because it belongs to this work whoever does it. I wrote it up with the times per size in the article on the order of 680 pieces.
The script this whole article is about. I have been writing it since 2025 for my own production and I use it daily. There is a version for Illustrator and one for CorelDRAW. The demo is free, limited by the number of runs and the number of rows in the spreadsheet.
Details: exportPDF for Illustrator · exportPDF for CorelDRAW · pricing and licenses. Related: what a small order looks like and where Print Merge in CorelDRAW ends.
