"We field tested our products after Drupa and found that customers wanted a greater degree of flexibility than the packages we originally envisaged bundling together," said FFEI managing director Andy Cook.

FFEI’s move means that there is now a comparable alternative in the market to Esko’s long-established DeskPack range of plug-ins for Adobe Creative Suite applications.

The PDF files created by the RealPro Toolkit plug-ins are optimised for the latest Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE)-based RIPs and workflows, such as FFEI’s own RealPro system. When used with an APPE system the linked data inside the PDF remains live to enable late-binding editing.

The modules include pre-flight module Inspect, viewer Eye, Link, Ink, Search, Tool, printers mark and control patch editor Mark, Trap and Nest. Further optional modules are Tiff, for exporting data in Tiff format, repeat, for controlling repeat length and joins and Warp to apply image distortion correction.

Six bundles are available Search, Nest, Prepare, Flexo, Studio and Complete, or customers can choose a bespoke package of modules.

"Over the next year we will also be adding additional functionality," added Cook.

The 12 plug-ins will get their first showing at Packaging Innovations at the NEC, Birmingham from 27-28th February.

The firm is increasing its focus on the packaging market this year, and will be appointing additional staff to support that, including direct sales in the UK of both the software and the Caslon digital label press. Cook said he was confident of concluding the first UK sale for the device, which despite 13 sales worldwide so far has yet to find a user in its home country.