Web-to-print
Web-to-print, also known as Web2Print, remote publishing or print e-commerce is a broad term that refers to the practice of doing print business using web sites. Companies and software solutions that deal in web-to-print often bleed into more standard e-commerce and online services like hosting, website design, and cross medial marketing.
The growing popularity of the internet and the World Wide Web has opened up opportunities for commercial printers to communicate with their partners and customers to do things like submit print jobs, do online prepress reviews/previews, design things like postcards directly on a website using rich user interfaces, direct cross media marketing and offer services such as variable data printing, photo printing, booklets, marketing campaigns, etc.
Web-to-print sites are available for commercial users or to the general public. A common offering from print houses is public or private online storefronts or catalogues.
Web-to-print increasingly calls for a Portable Document Format (PDF) workflow environment with output provided by digital printing; although there is certainly no requirement that fulfillment be accomplished using digital production equipment; web-to-print is also used today by printers with both offset and digital production facilities.