Software - Web-to-print

When Seybold closed the doors to its 1999 San Francisco expo last month, three technology trends stood dominant: the Internet, PDF and the quest for the all-digital workflow. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO If one potent word could sum up the energy, enthusiasm and very direction of Seybold San Francisco, held for the final time this century at the Moscone Center last month, it could easily be: Internet. The Internet, the World Wide Web. Seybold San Francisco was a virtual debutante's ball for the global gateway that is the Internet. New companies emerged as major players for the commercial printing market—all gearing to harness the

Preflighting via the Internet. Emulating RIPs to ensure accurate digital files. Automating workflow-critical checks for font usage in PDF documents. A variety of fresh innovations are signaling a new dawn for preflighting. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Preflighiting is experiencing a renaissance, of sorts, with the Internet, PDF and the pressing demand for more intensive automation, which is pushing technology providers to deliver more interactive file checkers. Markzware is moving its preflighting efforts onto the Internet—proof being the company's recently introduced MarkzNet, a Web-based preflighting application that uses drag-and-drop tools to preflight digital files. Extensis, also moving to the Internet, has launched Preflight

The latest digital imposition tools are object-independent, page rotating, PDF imposing signature refiners—automating even further the territory once governed by the meticulous manual stripper. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Manual stripping. One day—perhaps today—the task of manual stripping will seem as foreign a concept to the seasoned graphic arts professional as does the nearly lost art of photo engraving. Current imposition tools perform a flexible and varied set of clever tasks: Digitally imposing signatures that can be output on a variety of PostScript-compatible devices, from the digital press to a platesetter to an imagesetter; Rotating and viewing any object on any signature; Creating complete, precise impositions in

Last fall I wrote: "I continue to imagine that a new breed of print buyers will team up with a new generation of print manufacturers, and take advantage of the efficiencies and cost savings that the Web affords. But compared to computer buyers and book buyers, this new breed remains a tiny minority of today's market. When will it reach critical mass?" I referred to three companies that had begun to offer print purchasing via the Web. The list has expanded considerably since then, and now includes Collabria, ImageX, Impresse, I-Print, Noosh, Print Bid, PrintChannel, PrintMarket and Printing Network. Although I'm trying to closely

Next-generation power workstations (HINT: like Apple's new G4) are catapulting prepress productivity to new heights—with help from the ever-omnipotent server. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO More power. More memory. More speed. More storage. More flexibility. More performance. What prepress professionals wouldn't want more in the way of productivity from their power workstations? After all, the key word is power, isn't it? Otherwise, it's just a workstation—and doesn't that sound boring? Up until the recent Seybold San Francisco show, the two most power-packed power workstations gaining graphic arts attention were Apple's 400MHz Power Macintosh G3 and SGI's Intel-powered 320 and 540 visual workstations, which sport a

The challenge within publishing is how to maximize the usage of existing network and server resources, yet maintain a viable workflow. How do you keep up with the increasing number and volume of files? New technologies are compressing, scaling and reinventing ways to manipulate digital content—signaling the dawn of resolution-independent digital prepress and more effective images. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Future serving. The conversion from an environment where photographic images are described as pixels to a more purely mathematical representation of images will result in fundamental changes in serving processes. Dennis Aubrey, president at Burbank, CA-based Altamira Group, is intimately familiar with this reality. Altamira

A few years ago, Adobe set out on a quest to promote an integrated, flexible printing architecture developed to streamline prepress and production workflows. Today, Adobe Extreme is in place at commercial printers the likes of Johnson Printing. Is the Colorado-based printer's experience with the new printing architecture truly extreme? Printing Impressions sought the answer. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Faster prepress. This was a primary goal for Johnson Printing, a Boulder, CO-based commercial printing operation with its sights set on adopting Adobe PDF. Circa late 1998, prepress employees at Johnson worked on different computers with expensive, proprietary software that required customer materials to

Gurus of management love to publish books with titles like "Reinventing the Corporation." And while many of this genre provide useful information about breaking down corporate barriers—usually internal ones—they assume that the reader works in a large corporate environment. Sadly, this is of little help to managers of the average commercial printing company or trade shop, whose employees are often numbered in two digits. Yet, the impact of technological change is just as large in a 25-person prepress firm as it is for a giant corporation such as Applied Graphics Technologies. Therefore, this month's pontification will try to address workflow re-engineering in our little

Prinergy can scale its client/server architecture to increase system throughput in small-to-large commercial printing operations. The objective: Add software and hardware components until the workflow is keeping up with the pace of CTP. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Client/server technology has been implemented in many industries. Whether booking reservations for air travel or making a last-minute stop at an ATM, both are direct links to some form of client/server architecture designed to improve speed and performance. Now, prepress is following suit. Yes, client/server architecture—a term just vague enough to encompass a variety of digital workflow solutions that link users at their desktops to the servers processing their files—is

Whether drum or flatbed, today's high-tech scanning systems are allowing prepress departments to do more, create more—even charge more. Here's a look at some of the new technologies and creative techniques empowering prepress with high-voltage scans. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO The scanning market, like those of its prepress counterparts, is continuing to evolve, especially the flatbed component. Interesting, though, how much hype is concentrated around the kings of digital output, such as the thermal platesetter—arguably the most hyped digital output device ever to hit electronic prepress. But what of the content creator—the device that enables color images to be digitized, manipulated, then output?