Hi,
From the sound of it, you are mainly interested in the nesting functionality, rather than the traditional Vector rasterization functionality of RIPs.
While a good RIP produces excellent output (because of its close integration with the printer hardware), the image/page editing applications together with the manufacturer's printer drivers (and in the case of MacOS, part of the OS) can nowadays deliver excellent results.
There are some things that need to be taken care of, one of them being a high-quality resampling of the image raster data to the printer driver's native resolution, to avoid an additional low-quality resampling by the printer driver. Also, the addition of high-quality "Output sharpening"
after the resampling phase, makes a big difference.
A
very affordable solution for both the nesting and the resampling/sharpening requirements, is
Qimage Ultimate. While a Windows program, it also runs fine under Parallels on the MacOS. Some Mac users even use a dedicated PC to run Qimage on for their print jobs. The ability of Qimage to watch 'Hot folders' even allows sending print jobs wirelessly from remote locations.
Qimage is also
not tied to a specific printer or limited by a maximum size. No, it can print to any printer that has a functioning printer driver, at any size that the printer driver allows (and often even bigger than that). So for those who run multiple printers, or upgrade their hardware regularly, only a single license is required.
I've been using it for some 15 years already, and it has gotten even better (and still does) with each new version. Highly recommended.
Cheers,
Bart
