Software - Web-to-print

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

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?

At Seybold San Francisco, Creo and Heidelberg are launching Prinergy—a page-based workflow solution that leverages Adobe Extreme technology to create customized PDF job tickets and process plans. What's so electric about Prinergy? The first joint-venture development for Creo and Heidelberg, Prinergy brings Adobe into the alliance by offering an end-to-end workflow solution based not only on PDF, but also Extreme. Prinergy is one extreme workflow management system that integrates, organizes and automates the individual tasks in prepress. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Prinergy, a page-based workflow solution being launched this month at Seybold San Francisco by Creo and Heidelberg Prepress, elevates Adobe's PDF file format and

I admit it. I am a UNIX bigot. Having come to the printing industry from the computer side—they called it "data processing" back then—I took a dim view of other operating systems. That was back in 1989. Of course, I have had to eat my words on more than one occasion since then, attacked on one side by Macintosh evangelists (zealots?) and, later, Windows NT folks on the other. For those of you who aren't up on the latest in UNIX, this operating system was initially developed by Bell Labs back in the '70s. Ma Bell did not commercialize it because of antitrust concerns and

If maximizing RAID storage power and strengthening server support sound promising, surf the fibre channel— the next tech wave to boost the potential of RAID. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Imagine that you're on a tight deadline to finish a four-color project—a high-end, 110-page catalog featuring automotive accessories for a popular sports utility vehicle dealer. It is 8 p.m. on Tuesday. All is going well. Images have been scanned and the project is almost done being pushed through the prepress department. Working late and feeling benevolent, you decide to order pizza for your night shift, kick back, send a few long overdue e-mail responses

NEXPO, headlining in Las Vegas this month, touts trends in digital asset management, imagesetters, new RIP releases and other digital prepress tools designed to make the front page move in digital directions. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Newspapers are at a disadvantage when it comes to reaping the full benefits of electronic prepress, at present, for the obvious reason: Experimentation can cost—and, with the front page at stake, few newspaper greats would push for thermal imaging innovation at the risk of an unplanned late edition. However, are newspaper executives, who are in positions of operational and production management, taking note of the technologies driving thermal