By Editor Morten B. Reitoft

Ward De Langhe, is the CTO of CHILI publish. Here at SPICYtalks in Berlin, he is presenting Version 6 that will be released already in December 2019. We have been a huge fan of CHILI Publisher for many years. Still, though many brands today are using CHILI publisher as an important, and according to CEO Kevin Goeminne, growing number of 'pages' generated, I also believe a lot of people still don't know what CHILI is, and how valuable it is. 

CHILI Publisher is, of course, too big to describe in short, but think of CHILI Publisher as an online design tool. Then imagine that you can build rules, and add data sources to your fields. Then imagine that you build a front-end where you can let your users use the services you offer. Some will see it as a design tool in a web-to-print solution, some will see it as an advanced photo-book software, some will see a tool that generates documents with variable data, in different sizes, for different output devices - from printers to screens, to well - almost anything. This hopefully gives you an idea that CHILI Publisher is not just an online version of InDesign. CHILI Publisher is a software that enables brand-owners, and also printing companies to create services that via a front-end, or via an API can accommodate complex tasks automated. 

According to Kevin Goeminne 11.2% of top company's revenues go into marketing. However, about 24% is used on manual processes for which some could be automated.

With CHILI Publisher, you build templates that accommodate the needs for each of the automation you'll need.

When CTO Ward De Langhe presented Version 6, this is a major version upgrade, and some of the features are really interesting. At the recent PRINTING United 2019 Products Specialist, Sean Crowe gave a presentation to me, that you can see here. Among the features presented is a new barcode generation tool (barcode engine 2.0), new PDF engine where speed and file-size are optimized to an extent almost unbelievable. In Version 6 it's now also possible to add spot-colours in your CMYK separations. This opens up for new very exciting options to, i.e. extend your colour-space, or as I was thinking maybe using 5-colour options on devices like Xerox Iridesse, Ricoh 7XXX series, and other machines with 5-colour options. One of the major changes in Version 6 is the new template tool. Ward De Langhe show a few examples of how easy it is to create even complex templates, where functions combined with the visual output simply gives the end-user a way better control of the output. Imagine you have bars or dials, where the visual presentation needs to be adjusted to the actual value - well, CHILI Publisher Version 6 solves this easy. 

Of course, more to it - and we hope to at some point be able to give you more details.