Since both products support Custom Print and similar formatting and layout features, many of you have not realized how these two products are designed to complement each other. The two products address a very different subset of requirements typically found in a demanding print and job-preparation site.
--> Arranger is like Word for image files -- it is designed to edit or build one document at a time (frequently using parts of other documents in the process), and to specify how this document is to be printed.
--> UltraPrint is like many other "print management" programs you've seen -- it's workspace displays queues, print jobs and their document structure. It serves as a "backend" partner to Arranger, allowing multiple document print jobs to be built and printed as a set or a book. The BIG difference between UltraPrint and its competitors is print-time impositioning -- we do not modify the original document(s) in the print job but rather compute the layout and job-specific choices as we generate the print data stream. This means the same documents can be linked into multiple print jobs with different layouts or positions in the book; also, we do not have to generate one big monolithic memory-hogging and time-consuming PDF file to send to the printer.
--> Even though the newer releases of UltraPrint have an integrated viewer, Arranger's powerful editing features remain a single click away for late-stage document editing from within UltraPrint.
--> Both UltraPrint and Arranger share AltoScript for ripping PDF and postscript files, and both have advanced print controls for page setup, layout, header/footers, variable data/overlay printing, page numbers, etc. Arranger, as an interactive editing program, let's the user mark pages as tabs, three-hole, color, and these tags are now "remembered" within Arranger, and also when the document is used along with others in UltraPrint -- another example of how these two programs complement each other.
--> UltraPrint imports Xerox RDO files (a powerful feature which others charge tens of thousands for!); Arranger does not. Arranger has built-in optical character recognition (OCR); UltraPrint does not. UltraPrint has a built-in web-link for remote job submission from a driver or a simple graphical web-form; Arranger does not.
--> Hopefully this clarifies the "front-end" <--> "backend" relationship of Arranger and UltraPrint. Their overlap in features occurs because both must be able to perform certain functions related to printing, but their primary feature sets support each other to make a powerful printing and publishing solution. Please see this comparison diagram for Arranger vs. UltraPrint which graphically summarizes the much of the above discussion.
Don't forget that both Arranger and UltraPrint have "client" versions that cost only a few hundred dollars, allowing you to spread the capabilities around to multiple PCs within your work area. Compared to our competitors' products, Arranger and UltraPrint together can provide you high performance and features at much more affordable prices.
