Hamilton--An Issue of Compatibility

Perhaps the most incredible thing about the printing industry is that it actually works. Most of the time, anyway. Think about it: You have a sophisticated manufacturing process driven by people hired specifically for their creative expertise.

Adding to the confusion, the disparate nature of this service industry makes it virtually impossible to standardize procedures—which is why workflow is such a vague term. In many cases, designers, ad agencies, publishers, prepress trade shops and printers are all separate business entities; at a minimum, there are two parties: content creator and prepress/printer. And, just for fun, there's the subjective nature of the printed product itself adding to the confusion.

As for me, I've always wondered what people are talking about when they say the image needs more "pop" or ask the press operator to "bring up the reds." Is that like raising children as communists?

At issue here is customer training and education. Frankly, it's hard enough to master all of the necessary desktop publishing software programs, even for narrowly defined tasks. Furthermore, this is becoming more complex as vendors such as Adobe and Quark try to increase the versatility—and sell upgrades to a saturated market—by adding tools to programs like Photoshop and QuarkXPress. With designing for the Web pulling graphic artists in totally new directions, as well as a different color space, it's no wonder that supplied files continue to make prepress technicians pull their hair out.

Recently, this issue came into focus on one of the industry bulletin boards. Although the particular beef was over color management, this type of problem has been around since "RageMaker" came onto the market in the mid-'80s. In this particular instance, the printer had spent hours optimizing images for particular output conditions—in this case CMYK—and then sent them to the client for cropping and other minor adjustments. When the files came back, they were in a different color space (RGB) and all the printer's efforts were for naught.

In the ensuing posts, the issue of responsibility came up in a number of guises. Was this the fault of Adobe, for embedding color management utilities in Photoshop? The designer/client for misusing it? Or the printer for not educating or warning the client about the files and their device dependence? In my mind, the printer was guilty only of not making backups of the files. The rest of the problem is one that goes far beyond color spaces and device dependence.

Here we get to the issue of how much training should the printer/ prepress supplier provide—and how much the designer/client is willing to accept. As the printer rightly noted, although his firm provides training and file assembly instructions, it is not in the education business.

Complicating this issue, more than a few designers are of the opinion that they know Photoshop—or any other application for that matter—better than any damn printer. And perhaps they do—but probably not in the same way. Creative retouching is one thing; satisfying the color gamut requirements of the printing process is another. Sadly, the two are more intertwined than either party would like.

The real question is how, or to what extent, can the prepress service supplier control the tools used by the content creator. Wouldn't it be cool if you could make clients' applications bark out one of those "Danger, Will Robinson!" warnings whenever they attempt to do something that won't output or print correctly. Clearly, applications such as Markzware FlightCheck and Enfocus PitStop are steps in the right direction, but they are reactive; that is, they tell the client after the fact that the images are in RGB or that fonts are missing.

Beyond all the hype and controversy surrounding the invasion of e-commerce and the dotcoms, one of the most promising aspects of these new services is that they offer the potential to mandate quality assurance during the file assembly phase.

This idea was first brought to my attention by Collabria's Robert Hu, who stressed the integrated manufacturing idea more than the commerce side of his company's services.

Right now, this capability is a bit clunky and limited to relatively simple products such as business card procurement. But looking into the future a bit, it seems realistic to believe (or hope) that the tool sets will be extended to cover more subjective issues such as image retouching, as well as more complex printing projects involving multiple nested files.

Although some might dismiss the notion that designers and other clients will accept external controls on the way they use their applications, there is a very good likelihood that it will happen in the near future—to all of us. Whereas the software industry's sales model is currently built on a distributed application model, in which each user buys a license to install and use a single copy of the application on his/her system, this is almost certainly going to change.

In the networked world, there is no need for Adobe, Microsoft or Quark to provide you with a disk; they can let you access and use the software whenever (and where-ever) you want using an ASP model. For the software vendor, this solves the intellectual property piracy issue once and for all because no one will be able to download or copy the application any more.

Beyond the Big Brother overtones, this could provide content creators and their printers the means with which to collaborate more efficiently. Using this type of system, the job parameters—the layout specs, ink sets and finishing requirements—could invoke rules governing the way in which the applications are used by the designer. No more missing fonts with supplied files, no more color space conversions after you've spent hours tweaking the separations for particular printing conditions.

I admit that this scenario is still a few years away. However, I also believe that, like it or not, we will most likely be using groupware in the foreseeable future. While it may be irksome to think that Messengers Gill and Warnock have control over the tools with which printers and prepress technicians run their businesses, at least they'll help make designers play by our rules, too.

Printing just might become an integrated manufacturing process after all. What a concept.

—Alex Hamilton

About the Author
Alex Hamilton, a former technical editor with Printing Impressions, is president of Computers & Communications Consulting, which specializes in digital technologies for printing and publishing. He can be reached at (215) 247-3461 or by e-mail at alexh@candcc.com.