Patchplanner cuts out the printed elements of a printed design and gangs them on the smallest plate possible, thereby reducing the plate cost for large format jobs that only require a small area to be printed.

The software then sends the cutting pattern to the cutting table and provides the AV Flexologic plate mounter with the data it needs to automatically mount the individual plate elements on the correct sized sleeve ready for printing.

Jan Ruysschaert, managing director of Hybrid Software, said: "Flexo plates are very expensive and anyone operating in a pre-press department will immediately see the attraction of Patchplanner.

"When producing something like a corrugated box, it is not unusual for only a tiny area to need to be printed even though the box itself may be large. Until now a great deal of manual work has generally been required in order to avoid using large flexo plates."

He added that using Patchplanner software together with automated CTP, cutting and mounting hardware from the likes of Thermoflexx, Zünd and AV Flexologic respectively, was "an extremely cost-effective method of producing flexo plates for this sort of job".

The cloud-based software has cross-platform support for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer web browsers and will output XML files with mounting mark coordinates automatically transferred to AV Flexologic's Optimout kit.