Software - Web-to-print

Digital asset management (DAM) solutions are plentiful, ranging wildly in everything from robustness to flexibility to price. But which offering is right for you? That may be the million-dollar question. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO The search is on. There are at least 75 DAM technology providers (not a slight on these fine technologists, just a widely tossed about, clever acronym for digital asset management) that are more than happy to visit you, send you materials, access your digital archiving weaknesses, advise you on ways to retool the content management at your operation and probably wash your car if you ask them nice enough. For

BY ERIK CAGLE (Editor's Note: This is the first in a year-long series of articles examining the Year 2000 problem as it applies to the commercial printing industry. The first installment is an introduction to the Y2K bug and its potential impact on the business community at large.) It is February 1999. Do you know where your company's Year 2000 (Y2K) initiative stands? Like a Nostradamus prediction, the business world has been hearing bits and pieces of a terrible day of reckoning. But the Y2K bug, the nasty little pest that is as obvious as the clock in the upper right hand corner of

Digital front ends are growing in flexibility and functionality, allowing for greater output opportunities, especially in areas of digital color proofing. Are DFEs where they need to be—technically speaking? Most are headed in the right direction, thanks to the promise of PDF. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO The success of any print production process—whether it is direct-to-film, direct-to-plate or imposition proofing—relies fully on the competence of the digital front end in question. Digital front ends, or DFEs—rich in providing controls for color management, PDF support and a host of in-RIP capabilities, including trapping—are taking the front end to higher levels of sophistication. What is a

With PostScript 3, PDF and PostScript Extreme delivering on their promises to facilitate faster print production, visionaries at Adobe are casting their view to PDF refinements—and uncovering the next great print production performer. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO The introduction of PostScript placed Adobe Systems at the center of a growing web of desktop publishing solution providers. With the launch of Adobe's PostScript Extreme architecture and the rise of PDF, now, more than ever, Adobe is standing at center stage. What are Adobe's star qualities? Originally designed to demonstrate that PostScript could be imaged at or above engine speeds, Adobe PostScript Extreme expanded its

Gigabit ethernet is fast becoming an industry standard. Do you know what it is? More important, do you know what it can do to bolster the networking power of your most demanding RIP workstation or workgroup server? Better find out—your competition may already be capitalizing on this ethernet craze. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Centralized content. As more and more digitally minded commercial printers exploit the merits of faster desktop publishing workstations and higher performance servers, fast ethernet functionality is becoming the standard connection. But, for truly high performance networking, gigabit ethernet is making some serious strides. What is gigabit ethernet? Put simply, "gigabit" is

Web money-makers push the technological envelope. BY ERIK CAGLE Ask 100 non-computer-technology-related companies why they have a Web site, and 95 will probably respond, "To have a presence on the Internet." Those respondents are in good company. At least 3 million Internet domain names have been registered under .com, .net and .org. Network Solutions, which has registered 75 percent of all domain names worldwide, reported a record 443,000 net new Internet domain names in the second quarter of 1998, up 91 percent from the second quarter 1997 total of 232,000 names and 30 percent from first quarter total of 340,000. Cumulative net registrations

Ever wonder how the best stay ahead of the competition? Just ask the staff at Millet The Printer, a family-owned general commercial printer in Dallas. Millet The Printer enjoys that reputation of striving to be the best. Research, hard work and a variety of jobs led the 65-year-old company to detour from the drum scanner market by purchasing a Cézanne flatbed CCD scanner from Screen (USA) last October. The company hasn't regretted the purchase. "Previously, we didn't have nearly enough scanner capacity for our production needs," says Mike Stoker, prepress manager for Millet. "Our drum scanner alone was not sufficient. We thought flatbed quality

BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Many of the prepress and press manufacturers within the CIP3 consortium are Adobe OEM customers and, as such, rely heavily on Adobe to share its vision on emerging digital workflows with the CIP3 membership, as well as to participate actively within the consortium to make sure that the strategies and technologies defined by CIP3 are supportive of industry trends. At present, all eyes are on Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and its impact on the direction of CIP3's Print Production Format (PPF). Over the past two years, Adobe—the founding force behind the industry's migration to Portable Document Format (PDF) compatibility—led the effort

As visitors enter the lobby of Westland Printers, they're stunned by a riot of color. The commercial custom printer displays samples of its work on two full walls. There's no missing the fact that Westland prints sophisticated multicolor brochures, many of which feature diecut and embossed covers produced on-site. Despite the complexity of the work, when Westland Printers accepts jobs these days, it's with the understanding that they'll be out the door within a week. Typically, the Burtonsville, MD, family-owned printer has between seven and 10 working days to turn a job around. And, points out company President Barbara Westland, that type of delivery is

No longer a boring storage selection, today's RAID solutions are showing RAID, too, can be a glitzy technology with complex, surprising powers. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Since an explosion of digital connectivity, asset management and electronic prepress technologies hit the printing industry like a Hollywood blockbuster comet, terms such as megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and now even petabytes—all used to describe the size of digital storage needs—have filtered into the printing atmosphere. A logical phenomena. In the ever-dawning age of electronic prepress, functions such as RIPing a massive file, digitally archiving a file, or executing production of that file through applications like OPI and CTP