Software - Web-to-print

BY MARK SMITH Like digital cockroaches, file errors have threatened to infest electronic prepress operations since the first job was sent to a RIP. Problems caused by missing fonts or photos, RGB colors, improper transformations, etc., persist despite the industry's best efforts to eradicate them. What makes the situation so frustrating is that there's a ready solution for eliminating these bugs—just get clients to prepare their print files correctly—and processing bottlenecks will become extinct. Given that the digital revolution is more than a decade old and receiving bad files still is a top industry complaint, that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

BY CHRIS BAUER With PRINT 01 just around the corner, and thousands of printers ready to storm the show floor in Chicago, laminating equipment suppliers are confidently standing ready to seal a deal and send many show attendees back to their shops with new laminating gear in tow. "Most of our customers are looking for compact, automatic machines with standard equipment (including) feeder, calender, separator and collection table, easy installation and low prices," contends Dr. Cesare Sassi of American Binding Co. "A few are also looking for high-speed machines with savings on working time and on raw material costs. Some customers are asking

BY MARK SMITH The basic concept has been given many names. Digital Smart Factory. CIM—computer integrated manufacturing. CIP4—International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress. Or, you can simply call it "process automation." Welcome to system integration in the digital age. The terminology alone is confusing enough. System integration used to be a fairly straightforward problem in the graphic arts arena, even if productive solutions were sometimes hard to come by. The challenge was to get different pieces of electronic prepress equipment to communicate and work together efficiently in a unified workflow. While the digital revolution was redefining the front

BY MARK SMITH Digital photography spans two worlds, requiring users to meld near equal parts of artistic flare and technological prowess. This dichotomy has impacted the adoption of the process almost as greatly as advances in the technology. As a result, the business picture has been complicated. When the first digital cameras were introduced, there was a school of thought that said these devices were most akin to scanners and should be approached as such. The logical conclusion was that digital photography should be a prepress process. However, the experiences of early adopters soon revealed that the photographer's "eye" still was required to get

I intended to devote this column to an exploration of the PrintTalk specification and to JDF (the Job Definition Format). I got the idea when I opened the April issue of Printing Impressions and noticed an advertisement for PrintTalk (placed just below my column). The ad listed a bunch of sponsoring vendors, and had the headline "Demand PrintTalk-enabled Solutions from Your Suppliers." I went to five or six of the Websites of the vendors listed in the ad and searched for a mention of PrintTalk. I couldn't find one. The ad for PrintTalk lists a Web site—www.PrintTalk.org. There I learned that PrintTalk "is a

BY CAROLINE MILLER Performance Printing Vice President and Sales Manager Debbie Moore reaches for the bottle of aspirin less and less these days. Instead of chasing down faxes, responding to customer job queries and shuffling paper work, she is spending more time selling to new clients and building better relationships with her existing clients. Moore is one of a few commercial printers who are enabling their clients to track jobs over the Internet. A Collabria user for the past 18 months, Moore's clients—which primarily purchase collateral materials—are able to track their print jobs via a desktop Web browser. "It frees our time up.

By the time you read this column, Adobe will have announced an upgrade to Acrobat—called Acrobat, Version 5.0, and a new version of the Portable Document Format (PDF), Version 1.4. I'd like to proclaim this the most anticipated new software release of 2001, and to call PDF 1.4 the "file format of the year." In fact, there's been very little advance buzz about either the new Acrobat or the new version of PDF. So I was surprised when I sat down with Adobe to take a look at what was coming in the software. I think it's a very important upgrade. In this consumer age, we're

BY MARK SMITH Since the dawn of the digital age in the graphic arts, remote proofing has seemed to be a logical way to more efficiently communicate with print clients. At that point, the Internet was still just the domain of computer geeks and researchers, and terms such as e-production and ASP wouldn't be coined for years. Yet, some prepress pioneers were trying to find effective ways to build electronic bridges to their client sites. The cost of maintaining a digital pipeline to customers had traditionally been a significant barrier to adoption of remote proofing. Given the rate at which high-speed Internet access is

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Pageflex Inc. and Xerox Corp. have entered into an agreement that gives Xerox the right to resell Pageflex's Mpower and Persona variable-data software on a non-exclusive, worldwide basis. Pageflex software also will be incorporated into a soon-to-be-announced solution from Xerox for the personalized and customized printing market. (www.pageflexinc.com and www.xerox.com) FAYETTEVILLE, AR—University of Arkansas Printing Services has added a new digital Xerox 6180 Book Factory system to its facility. Consisting of a digital printer and several binding units, the system was chosen by Rich Bundsgaard, director of printing services, after he researched a variety of alternatives. The university is

The Real Deal OnlineAssetExchange.com seeks to bring pricing transparency to the business of used equipment. Looking for a used six-color Komori? Need additional bindery gear to fulfill a contract? Then logging onto OnlineAssetExchange.com may be a way to quickly solve an equipment crisis. Launched in March of 2000, OnlineAssetExchange.com began as an online exchange and auction site dedicated to selling industrial equipment. In just under a year, it has become the largest seller of secondary assets in the used industrial equipment space with 200,000 line items, which is comprised of about $14billion in assets, according to the site's co-founder Norm Bastin. With its success in the industrial