DSF

Microsoft research auto image 2008

This was a development program by university students, followed it to the end but still available, have a look,select the picture/images, size required and let the prog do the rest

We used to use ImageNest when we had an HP Z3200 printer, and it was ok. Bit flaky with some PDFs and large Tiffs, but they may have made improvements recently. Obviously doesn't meet your requirements of PC rather than Mac. When we upgraded our print hardware we went to Caldera (original on Mac, but now running on Linux) which may be an option as you could run it in a virtual machine.

Alternatively, you could look at Onyx, this is the big competitor to Caldera. When we tested it (mostly printing posters like this) at our shop, we found it to be a bit of a resource hog because of the way it RIPs files when you import.

Caldera is much faster and the Nesting is excellent. Its also pretty reliable, handling all file types and PDFs properly too as it is built on Adobe PDF engine. Not cheap, and it might mean you have to buy virtualisation or a cheap tower PC to run as a Linux box. But in our experience its been a worthwhile upgrade.

captaincyan;101467 wrote:
Caldera is much faster and the Nesting is excellent.

And at $4,000 a real bargain!

Hoping to resurrect this thread

Still not found anything that meets with my requirements but I feel I'mm getting close! Qimage may well do the job but I need to play with the trial more before I can be sure.

ImageNest looks very close but is Mac only and I need for PC.

In a nutshell I'm looking to frag and drop images onto a large canvas and they will auto rearrange for the best print layout. I can see Qimage should do this but I will also need a set gap around certain prints....still looking into that!

Anyone know of anything else worth a look? I don't need many of the features on Qimage (although they may prove useful) So something clean and simple would work.

I'm wondering if a RIP may be the answer. Looking at software like Shiraz etc. which have nesting functions.

not sure if this software is appropriate but it says it does nesting.
http://www.vinylmasterseries.com/en/products_rip.html

Having read through the info on the link it sounds like RIP may be the answer

I'll take a look cheers. RIPS do seem to have nesting. I found one that works very simply but at £1000 it would take some justifying

They do seem to cost alot of money and I would be in the same boat as you with needing to justify it. I use a different version of the Vinylmaster program for basic design, vectorizing of images and scaling ( for van images etc) its been faultless for the few basic tasks I asked of it. They have videos on youtube incase anybody was interested in it. Only downside is that it is based in Australia so support can be a bit delayed if its needed.