Regionalised versions of national daily USA Today are being customised and assembled automatically using PuzzleFlow software.

The company says that since a “quiet implementation” last year, automation features built around its PDF Library locate and place custom editorial content and regionalised advertisements on customized and zoned pages. A base page is automatically “married” with the appropriate content, stitched into a single PDF page and distributed for final output and printing.

Previously the process – creating pages with different editorial and ad content for different regional versions of the paper – was a more complex process: Locating and placing the different stories and advertisements for the many variable pages in each of the dozens of regional versions required multiple software packages and manual, page-by-page intervention.

Automation means one USA Today base page is created and the entire process of creating the dozens of variations is handled by the PuzzleFlow software, which also handles centralised page processing and preflight for all Gannett newsrooms and studios, as well as commercial print file processing for Gannett Publishing Services (GPS).

It was first implemented to provide all page normalization, preflight, auto-correction and distribution of files including “page fixing”, ink optimisation and ancillary file creation.

USA Today has average daily paid readership of more than 1.8 million and is printed at 33 sites throughout the USA.