This week I was asked to help prepare artwork for a commercial print job. The job involves a die-cut template to be used for packaging across a range of products, for which there are some 40 different variants.

The customer supplied an individual block of information for each product, which needed to be merged with the template. This wouldn’t have been too complicated except these blocks weren’t supplied in a nice convenient PDF with one page per block, and everything in the same position: oh, no – the blocks were supplied as A4 pages, several to a page.

Needless to say, I was keen to avoid manually cropping out and placing 40 individual blocks – partly because it’s tedious, but also because it’s error-prone.

At this point you might be wondering where’s the “retro” angle in this sorry little tale…