A history of transitions

Pre-press’s history over the last 20 years has been a history of transitions and change, mostly the result of digital innovations and social development. Cast your mind back to 1989. It was a year of political revolution, starting in Poland and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. Rain Man won Best Picture at the Oscars, NATO turned 40, and Tiananmen Square protest and protesters were brutally quashed. France celebrated 200 years since its revolution, and Linotype acquired Hell from Siemens. The print industry was sort of leading the way in the media business: Batman was release in 1989 to become the highest grossing film based on a comic, a record that remained until the Dark Lord was released this year.

In 1989, the font wars that had been raging since the introduction of the Apple Laserwriter in 1985 were finally resolved. Bill gates of Microsoft and John Sculley of Apple announced an agreement to share outline font technology and printer software. Microsoft acquired the rights to Apples font technology and Apple the Microsoft output drives. Fonts could now be endlessly manipulated and we could use type in every kind of digital document or software application. This delivered a massive wallop to Adobe, which had been hanging on tight to it proprietary font technology and its lucrative licensing deals. Within moments of the Apple and Microsoft announcement, a tearful John Warnock, cofounder of Adobe, conceded: the company would open up its outline font specification for Adobe Type 1 Fonts. This led ultimately to the use of digital type in every class of digital application, from print and far beyond.

Such was the drama of this announcement that everything else that year rather faded into insignificance. However, a new company EFI, founded by Efi Arazi who had also founded Scitex, introduced its first product, a colour data compression scheme for high speed on the fly data compression. This was a major step towards widespread colour use, at a time when colour was the preserve of highly specialised repro magicians. Still a new generation colour systems for artists and designers based on Sun workstations, with low cost scanners or links to high end colour systems was introduced that year. They had been available for several years, but MACS and PCs were still not taken seriously as professional computing devices for graphics applications, and especially not for colour work. Sun and DEC workstations and proprietary hardware were still the order of the day for all areas of pre-press, and the fastest RIPs took more than 40 minutes to image a line art file at 2400 dpi.

But MAC and PC based arrivistes started to come on the scene, particularly as PostScript’s spread continued, through the efforts of Adobe and assorted PostScript clone developers including Harlequin. Hints of coming shift were evident in the consolidation of the dedicated composition systems market and the preference of increasing numbers of developers for providing links to desktop publishing systems from their proprietary technologies. Albeit reluctantly, the move to off the shelf hardware was starting, with systems such as the Crosfield 9500 page make up station running under the Unix operating system.

To be continued…

See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5 of our blogs on Direct Mail and Transactional Print

Print Buying Direct is one of the Uk’s leading suppliers of graphic design and print, based in the Crewe and Nantwich area of Cheshire (UK) but supplying all of the UK & Ireland. See our websites for more information on graphic design, brochures, business cards, appointment cards, leaflets, flyers, pamphlets, posters etc

Print Buying Direct is a trading name of The Printing House Ltd. This brand was originally set up to protect the quality name of The Printing House of Crewe and Nantwich, Cheshire, Uk – recognised throught the North of England as a quality printers. Now Print Buying Direct has established itself over the last two years and has become a quality brand in its own right with very competitive prices nationally. Take a look at both websites and learn more about us.

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For more information please see our websites – especially our Printing Glossary – Printing A to Z – this makes a really useful guide for designers, printers, print buyers, college students etc.

Don’t forget The Printing House also specialise in Printing for Schools, especially School Prospectus, Secondary School Prospectus, College Prospectus, Primary School Prospectus & Sixth Form Prospectus. We have a vast range of experience design and print of primary, secondary, 6th form, college and universtity prospectus. Visit our School Prospectus Made Easy website to see examples of our work and more about our products. Our customer testimonials webpage is constantly being added to – please stop by and see our reviews.

PDF has become a de facto standard for graphic arts workflows because of its convenience, ubiquity and flexibility. The alternative to using PDF files as the basis for print production is to use either native files, meaning documents saved in the internal file format for the layout software, such as InDesign, Quark Xpress or perhaps Illustrator. We could also export the page content as postscript. But neither approach is ideal and there are benefits and drawbacks with both.

Application files

The problem with sending native files from a designer to a printer or prepress department is that the receiver needs to have the same software installed on their computer in order to be able to open the file. And that software needs to be the exact same version, and ideally running on the same type of computer platform, with the same version of the operating system. As if this want irritating and costly enough, all fonts and possible hyphenation and language modules need also to be in place and of the exact same version, as on the designer’s workstation.

Most layout software doesn’t embed images inside the page document, which is yet another source of possible errors. Instead they have pointers to the high resolution versions of images, which are generally stored somewhere else. This could be on the computer used to originate the file, or on an image server. Working with native files requires all of these variables to be taken into account, for the files to flow through production without mishap. Missing images or missing fonts, or both, are among the most frequent errors in prepress troubleshooting. These are all reason to work with PDF, where all file components from images to colours can be contained within a single file. It’s clear that PDF has mostly replaced Postscript as the preferred page description language. PDF files are easier to work with and less cumbersome to handle in print production than native layout document files from InDesign or Quark X Press. Preparing documents for print will perhaps never be childsplay, but using PDF files in general, preflighted and well prepared PDF/X files in particular, is the path to better, more secure file processing.

For more information on providing us with PDF files please don’t hesitate to contact us at The Printing House (Print Buying Direct)

BENEFITS OF USING VARIABLE INFORMATION APPLICATIONS

The output file is created such that static elements should get ripped only once and reused as needed. Both static and variable images, graphics and text can be printed on the same page. In many cases, large elements such as images, are not embedded in the output fi le, similar to an OPI workflow (referred to APR
by Creo). This allows the output file to be much smaller. It is commonly used for producing postcards, leaflets, brochures, annual reports, parish plans, town plans and business cards.

DESIGNING DOCUMENTS WITH VARIABLE INFORMATION

Unlike designing documents for offset presses, careful consideration must be given to the placement of static versus variable information. Graphic artists should have a good understanding of database and printing technology. They must also understand the capabilities of the software and hardware they are
using in order to successfully design a variable document.

LAYOUT AND DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

• Avoid using Quark frames on elements that contain variable information.
• When designing VI documents, keep in mind that trapping text at the RIP may not be applied to variable elements.
• When using variable imposition, ensure that all document pages are the same size and orientation.
• Printing documents containing simplex and duplex pages within the same document may not be supported. If documents must be printed with simplex and duplex pages within the same document, insert blank pages in the original layout and duplex the entire document.
• Whenever possible, embed all fonts or else the font must have the exact match at the RIP. However, OpenType fonts are cross-platform compatible.
• Type 1 fonts may have problems with kerning (may not be able to supply the kerning file).
• Some VI applications that create VIPP will take PDF resources and convert them to EPS but the result can be unpredictable.

IMAGE QUALITY CONSIDERATIONS

• For the best performance, ensure that all images are set at 300 dpi. Using a different resolution may slow down the RIP or reduce image quality.
• Ensure that all images are at their final resolution, size and orientation.
• All variable elements for a specifi c area should be cropped to the same size. Rotating, scaling and clipping images during the RIP will slow down performance and could cause improper placement or scaling.
• Do not save TIFF images with LZW compression.

VARIABLE FORMATS

• Some VI languages may not comprehend layering.
• If the VI authoring tool allows, position variable elements above static objects (bring to the front).
• When using APR with variable images, ensure that the names of the variable images conform to the same naming restrictions associated with APR and static images.

Information provided courtesy of The Printing House Ltd incorporating Print Buying Direct.