Quark Inc.

BY Kristen E. Monte Associate Editor The economy may have generated uncertainty within the printing industry over the past couple of years but, at Precision Printing, significant plans are being drawn for the future. This third-generation, family owned company, with two Ohio-based facilities, prides itself of providing clients with good old-fashioned customer service. When Izzy Leaventon and Abe Israel opened a small print shop in Cleveland in 1948, they had no idea that they were beginning a small printing empire. From day one, Precision Printing has dedicated itself to one goal—ensuring the highest quality products and services for its customers. Precision Printing executives,

Last summer I wrote a column for Printing Impressions called "Whatever Happened to Cross-Media Publishing?" In it I explored the 10-year history of the concept of cross-media publishing (sometimes called "media-independent publishing"). It sure sounded great in the early '90s: a single publishing system, a unified publishing workflow, encompassing both print and electronic (mostly online) media. But, I noted, "the majority of what we find in print today does not appear on the Web; and very little of what's on the Web ever makes it to print." Trying to figure out why the cross-media dream had not been realized I noted that what works best

SSF 2002 'Hot Picks' Reflect Shift in Focus SAN FRANCISCO—Seybold Seminars built a reputation, in large part, by being the forum for introductions of the latest and greatest innovations in print communications. How far it has evolved away from its roots is evidenced by the "Hot Picks" report compiled by the Seybold Publications editors for the recent Seybold San Francisco 2002. Bad luck and timing impacted attendance at last year's event, but light representation from the print community was expected again this year because of this shift in focus. More than 100 submissions reportedly were received for consideration as "must-see" products on the

BY MARK MICHELSON With its emphasis on attracting graphic arts professionals from both North and Latin America, the 27th annual Graphics of the Americas (GOA) exhibition, held in early February at the Miami Beach Convention Center, bucked current industry trends of weak buying activity and light trade show traffic. All told, 22,101 people attended the event, which featured over 500 exhibitors representing approximately 1,500 different companies and occupying nearly 1,400 booths. The Printing Association of Florida (PAF), the exhibition organizer, points to several key factors to explain the strong showing in light of recent economic turmoil. "As the first major printing, converting and graphic arts show

HP Looks to Get Good Press After grabbing a lot of attention at PRINT 01, Hewlett-Packard's deal to acquire all the outstanding shares of Indigo quickly was overshadowed by its much larger and somewhat controversial bid for Compaq. However, HP management reports the Indigo purchase is still on track and has only been slowed by the U.S., Israeli and Dutch laws involved. As vice president and general manager of Digital Publishing Solutions at HP, Bill McGlynn has been a point person for the Indigo acquisition. Assuming things go according to the original plan, the following Q&A with McGlynn offers some insights into what

BY MARK SMITH Deadline rule the realm in the publication market segment. Even the legendary power wielded by advertisers at some point must give way to the march of the calendar, if the next edition is to get out. At the same time, gaining an extra day to sell or a little more time to get late ads in can make a world of difference in profitability. The pressure to make every moment count has provided strong motivation for publication printers to implement computer-to-plate workflows. However, having that weekly or monthly publication date on the cover decreases the margin for error. It's also been

BY MARK SMITH PDF is supposed to stand for Portable Document Format, but "pretty darn frustrating" has been a more fitting moniker in many ways. When Adobe introduced the Acrobat software family, with PDF as its core technology, it was billed as the answer to the shortcomings inherent in the PostScript language, among other things. The coveted benefits of PDF include the ability to generate relatively small, self-contained (including fonts) files that can be processed more efficiently and reliably. Yet, more than five years later, PDF only now seems in a position to become the standard or even generally preferred file format

Dotcom companies enable printers to find new employees and attract more customers via the Internet. BY CAROLINE MILLER With just a click of the mouse, Miami Valley Publishing's Paul Barrett is improving his chances of finding qualified employees. And Rich Stevens of Stevens Printing is expanding his customer base. Both Barrett and Stevens are improving their businesses by taking advantage of the services two dotcoms are offering the printing industry. HireSkills.comIn today's tight labor market, finding seasoned employees in the graphic arts industry can be a challenge. But it's a challenge that HireSkills.com is helping commercial printers meet head-on. "The industry is challenged

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

It is increasingly difficult to find major vendors that have not jumped onto the XML bandwagon. Adobe, Agfa, Heidelberg and MAN Roland have teamed up to develop the Job Definition Format (JDF) using XML, while CreoScitex and Quark are both building XML-based applications to drive their own systems. In the e-commerce space, printCafe, PrintTalk—a nascent group of firms—and others are building transaction and supply chain management systems based on eXtensible Markup Language. Not to be left out, the on-demand group PODI has published a specification called PPML—Personalized Print Markup Language—based on this spec, and still another industry initiative, called the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP),