6thAnnual Technology Conference First Day

Indian Habitat Centre, New Delhi, 24-26 November 1999

Prepress Input and Output Technology and Device Update

Juergen Krufczyk

This is actually a very interesting time to talk about the technological trends because we are just about half a year away from Drupa. I think this time Drupa will be very different. The big subject at the last Drupa was computer-to-plate. There were about 49 exhibitors with computer-to-plate including the then Linotype-Hell with a huge system called Gutenberg. Everybody went back from Drupa and nobody bought computer-to- plate. Only a year or two later the trend started, when the products became more mature and it became more apparent that you can indeed save a lot of money going computer-to- plate, be more productive, etc.

General Trends
With the advent of the electronic media and the Internet, we often wonder whether the printing industry is going to survive. If we look at the total market - which is divided into the electronic and the print media - in 20 years it is more than doubling. Some years ago, we can clearly see that 2/3 or 80% of the media market was covered by the print media and the rest was consumed by electronic. This will sharply change in the future. We will not only predict a forecast of the total market, which is growing maybe by three times, but we’ll look at the print media itself. We think that between 1990 and 2010, the total market will more or less double. If we look at the electronic media, it is expected to grow by four or five times or even more. To me this is a pretty fair statement because so far we can see that the print media is also supporting the electronic media. So I feel that the printing industry will survive and grow, but the electronic media will pose a challenge which must be part of our business.

What is the driving force behind all this? In our industry we have to change because we are driven by changes in the computer industry. In all our products there are millions of chips and computer parts so that the computer industry dictates the changes we have to make in the prepress and press. The product cycle in the computer industry is a year or less now, which certainly changes our need to purchase certain products constantly. This is a disadvantage for the end-user in one way because we are forced to reinvest constantly. But nevertheless, the advantage we have from that with the computer chips becoming very fast, the data transmission rates become very fast.

The same is true for our industry, for example scanning. If you have a lot of data, it can only be handled professionally fast if you have the right computer power behind it. Increasingly we are going digital. I think that is the catchword everybody is using. There is no doubt that the only way out of the current squeeze between costs and performance and competition is to sooner or later cut out the film process. I am fully convinced that we’ll see a technology wave in prepress and consumer electronics-in a couple of years from now the view camera will be digital, about 30-40% of the scanner market will be replaced by digital cameras. There is no doubt that film is something which is going to be reduced in the process and in usage. Last but not least, we have to work with data which can be exchanged, we are in a global communication not only on the Internet but also on other kinds of data transfers.

The jobs we are given in the printing industry go across borders. The printing is more or less driven by computer power, which is changing our industry, and the 21st century is the age of information. It is a question of how well you are informed, it is not just buying a tool, it is how well you can use that tool that is important. In our prepress setups, there is a dramatic change; we are going away from having the knowhow of how to handle paper, ink and chemicals towards having the knowhow of how to handle digital data. This is the key to productivity and competitiveness. We need people who can use these kinds of digital tools professionally so that these tools bring you optimum productivity. . .

Page Layout and Page Composition Developments

Kunal Mullick

There is a shift towards electronic media, to a certain type of content such as digital libraries, directories, dictionaries, enclyclopaedias, technical journals, training manuals and the like, where hyperlinking and indexing with search and print facility, and on- demand capabilities enhanced the user experience of interacting with that information perceptibly enough to make it the preferred choice. But certainly until technology invents the medium of delivery that has the portability and the instant human access of a book without any cumbersome startup procedure readable in any position, having the resolution of print minus the radiation, the feel of paper where it will be possible to browse pages with a touch rather than a click, or maybe as Bill Gates said, with eye movement, that could simulate the aroma that emnates from a freshly opened book, I think it will be impossible to replace at least for a good many generations. The book does not really have an alternative. The media that we see emerging today are all complementing what we print and adding if used innovatively to its wider reach to society and to people who otherwise may not have been able to get hold of that information. $$$Today therefore books with added multimedia dynamic, hyperlinked and searchable content on CD Rom and the Internet, are very powerful product models for the effective dissemination of information, education and entertainment. Here too, there is a fight todat for establishing the standards for publihing e-books which are available on the Internet. These could be downloaded either for free at present, or on payment online from electronic bookstores. Adobe is pushing PDF while Quark and others feel that XML - the extended markup language which is the parent to the HTML, is the way to go. But there is still a lot to happen before this actually falls in place and people start buying electronic books regularly over the Internet. You have the success of Amazon.com - people buy books very conveniently over the Internet. So, you use the Internet to expand your present publishing market. It all depends on how quickly one is able to establish viable and secure payment transaction and copyright protection features into the technologies. I think everyone is working towards a scenario when you could actually have printed books as well as the electronic format available on the Internet and the same Pagemaker programme could do both and create a final output delivery format which has the protection of copyright. There are new issues that are coming up which one needs to look at when you are talking about page makeup and page layout of the future.

For the most efficient use of any page makeup and page layout programme, it is very essential to have in place a well structured workflow. A 100% digital workflow is a definite need of the future, without that however good your page layout programmes are, you’ll never be able to benefit from all its features and you’d still be doing a lot of rework thereby increasing your costs of production. Most publishing houses and service bureaus tend to take this issue very lightly and end up with extensive job rework, delays and unsatisfactory production. This is important when you start using Pagemaker programmes in your establishment.

Excerpts from the Discussion
Juergen Krufczyk: You love Quark very much apparently, but looking at Adobe’s dominance and innovative power with PDF, Acrobat, Indesign and especially with their web tools, don’t you think that Quark will go the same way as Harlequin as an Adobe competitor who can’t keep up with the pace?

Kunal Mullick: Quark is something that brought in a revolution of professional typesetting to the page makeup and composition industry, and you’re right when you say that Indesign is going to give every other programme a run for it’s money especially Quark because it is so well integrated with Illustrator and it’s the beginning of a different way of working with these tools and it’s very intuitive. And unless Quark does something very quickly, I am afraid they run the danger of going into oblivion. I am sure they are aware of this and there are many changes on the anvil but still today the typographic features available in Quark, the control that you have on them, especially for long document and book publishing, has to be implemented in Indesign and I am sure it will. But the other thing you mentioned about alternative publishing on the Internet, those are features that Quark needs to look at very seriously. It’s available only through thire-party extras, but these features need to be built into the programme and they have to work with industry standard tools more efficiently. . .

PDF and Digital Distribution of Advertising

R.S. Dugal

Digital delivery of advertisements is a very interesting phenomenon. About Rs 4000 crores worth of revenue according to me, was generated for the print media last year. Today, almost all the advertisements are designed digitally. Process houses design the advertisements digitally, put them on film, convert it from a digital to an the analog format, deliver the film to the newspaper, which has done almost its entire page digitally, and which is now getting its advertisements in an analog form. The analog advertisement is either stripped-in manually to the newspaper page, or it has to be scanned to convert it to a digital form. The most significant thing that happens with digital delivery is that there are no positives. You create the advertisement digitally, deliver it to the newspaper digitally, and the newspaper accepts it digitally. There are tremendous advantages. When we look at technologies, people accept technology primarily because it has some singular benefits for them. It creates a new revolution in the way you do business.

A lot has been said on how we transited from the old typesetting world to the new world with Postscript imagesetting. That’s exactly the revolution that’s waiting to happen as far as advertisements are concerned. It’s a win-win situation for everybody - for the advertiser and the advertising agency, for the newspaper and for the publisher. It happens without positives and without delays. Today this is a buyer’s paradise, as compared to 10 years ago, when it was a seller’s paradise. It’s the buyer who is demanding today, the time has come when somebody would like to release an advertisement just hours before the deadline of the newspaper and this should be possible to do. In fact, the new technology the world is asking for, is the auctioning of advertising space. The problems people have had with the conventional method of sending advertisements have been longstanding ones.

What is the underlying technology that is needed for digital delivery of advertisements? PDF is a great tool for digital delivery. Why? If I am an advertiser who uses an old version of QuarkXpress to design an advertisement and I want to send it to a newspaper which has the latest version of QuarkXpress and I use Gujarati fonts in my advertisement which the newspaper does not have, you cannot send an advertisement digitally unless you come to a point of the bare minimum of a backbone technology, a file format, technology standards where you can communicate. Acrobat has become de facto as far as digital delivery is concerned. In certain parts of the world I believe almost 60% of the advertisements are already transferred digitally. We have some case studies from Europe and Japan where this technology has become a reality. And PDF everywhere is becoming the absolute technology backbone. People have experimented with other file formats - EPS, JPEG, TIFF-IT but all things considered, Acrobat PDF is becoming the accepted technology.

Digital Express is the concept that we have for digital delivery of advertisements today. What and whom does it cover? It covers the publishers, advertising agencies, process houses, and the advertiser himself. Why do we need to have a solution which covers everything? If we do not have such a solution, the problems can be manifold. You take care of the technology inputs in terms of having fonts embedded within the documents, Acrobat file formats, you get into issues like colour management, or spot colours. Somebody is designing an advertisement and does not care to convert the image from RGB to CMYK, if it was on film it gets trapped very early in the process, the process house will not be able to take out the film, the newspaper will not receive the film. When you are cutting a huge amount of the component in-between which has traditionally been here for decades, there are going to be problems. Different newspapers have different column sizes, you release an advertisement at the last minute, when it is time for the newspaper to paste the advertisement electronically on the page, you realize that the size was wrong, it was RGB instead of CMYK. Some spot colours that were used were not converted by the advertiser into process colours.

So, you need somebody who is able to preflight, and control all these issues. You also do not need a situation where if one advertising agency has to send one campaign to twenty different newspapers, it has to make twenty different communication protocols, twenty different connections to twenty different newspapers. Hence all over the world what has emerged is the concept of a clearing house. You give all the advertisements to the clearing house, the clearing house gives the software to the advertiser and the advertising agency which makes sure that at the first instance when the advertisement is generated, it is generated correctly. The clearing house will not accept an advertisement that has any of the flaws that we have listed. And the clearing house distributes the advertisement to various newspapers. . .

Digital Workflow and CtP for Newspapers

Niels Andersen

In order to gain competitive advantages you have to adopt new technologies, to cut costs on manual labour, manual makeready processes and to enhance the quality levels of what you’re printing. Consequently, CtP is being adopted, the central task here is to overcome the workflow that has to be fully digital. CtP in Europe is very much driven by plate prices etc. CtP plate prices are still somewhat higher than conventional plates. But you have to look at the complete scenario including labour savings, and time savings of going CtP. Otherwise, the trend is, at least where I come from, CtP plate prices go down by 10-15% every year. So the time is ripe for a decision to be taken to move to CtP.

As far as newspaper workflows go, there has been a lot of focus on PDF, many vendors are promoting it as being the solution for the integrity problems of files, data exchange in general and of course, PDF has matured as the preferred way of document interchange between parties. However, I would say that for newspaper production it may not be the optimal format all the way through the workflow because newspaper production not only involves file exchange but having to handle deadlines and pressure. So we strongly believe that a PDF-based front-end combined with a very strong back-end is a truly happy marriage. To make this happen, you need a very practical approach to these things. I would be taking a nuts and bolts approach to, focussing on the back-end.

Whether CtP or CtF is used, certain issues will always be mandatory to address for newspaper production. These are predictability in the daily production environment, cost and time reduction through automisation of processes that are typically repeated everyday for newspaper production and of course, productivity. To clarify the workflow components, it’s beneficial to break the flow down into two parts - the front-end where you make up your pages, it makes the editorial, the advertisements and the classifieds, it comprises many external and internal sources of inputs pre-screened film being one, digital advertisements being another, but the characteristic is that it’s very irregular in its form so we will make a cut here when we talk about CtP workflows for newspapers because we will hook on the back-end, we will simply divide this, so that we say the back-end is where we need uniformity inorder to have a predictable workflow.

What can make this happen? How can we have uniformity in the back-end ? We are down to a format discussion again; if we go back in time, do we want a Postscript-based back-end? A Postcript-based back-end would require the imposition, the flat composition, to be made prior to RIPping. So there must be some automated, pre-RIPped page assembly application to do this. However, in a newspaper environment there are many sources of Postscript leading to unpredictable results, preflight or not, one area where we definitely do not want to have errors is in distributed printing, where it is essential that you do not have passing errors far away from where the Postscript was actually generated, that is, out in the field. So the correction cycle is very long. In the Postscript description language some parts of the Postscript won’t be device-dependent - it will rely on some features of the output device. It is not device-independent so it’s very unsuited even if it is resolution-independent for routing to other devices for instance for backup purposes. One of the other major points against Postscript-based workflow is, in practical life you often have to redo things. In a purely Postscript-based system, this requires a full flat to compose it. So Postscript is not suited for a back-end in a newspaper workflow.

How about PDF? The basic philosophy about PDF is to hammer out device- independence out of the format, making it a truly independent format. So you can print on different output devices and get predictable results. But you always have problems with font inclusion, spot colours, how to reassemble the images, etc. So there are a lot of issues of how you actually convert your Postscript to PDF using the Distiller or directly from the application; you still need to maintain and adjust the Distiller in order to get the right results from your imagesetter or platesetter. And like Postscript, if you make a change to one page on a signature, you’ll have to re-RIP the whole thing. Not that RIPping speed is of major importance in the newspaper production environment, RIPs are extremely fast. So it’s not the RIPping time itself that I am referring to here as being a nuisance, it’s actually the whole cycle of outputting Postscript again with a potential danger of the file being from another platform etc. You may not get the result you had in the first place. So PDF is well suited for file interchange, from advertising bureaus to the newspapers, but relying on a PDF-based back-end, is not our recommendation. . .

MIS, ERP, DAM

Ron Augustin

The first distinction I would like to make is in production control systems and what is generally called mamagement information systems. I define ‘production control systems’ as technically-oriented systems aimed at integrating certain production processes like the pre-flighting applications, the different options that are offered for prepress as workflow solutions, and the software which is used for the so-called PLCs or DCUs which are devices connected to the press for data collection, which have been around for quite a while. Then there are the integrated press systems like Man Roland’s Pecom, Heidelberg’s data control, Komori’s K-LAN and I think KBA’s Logotronic also falls in this category. When we talk about management information systems we actually talk about a much larger range of information systems, applications that are built on databases, allowing the tracking, retrieval and handling of all sorts of information. This can be production data, but it can also be anything which is used for sales, prospecting, planning, even for content management to a certain extent.

Asset Management
The term ‘asset management’ has been used for applications that we developed from the edge between production control systems and management information systems, and that’s actually where most of the confusion comes from. In the beginning when we were talking about file management or asset management, the kind of software that was developed or being developed for that designated graphic file archiving and retrieving systems. The term itself typically emerged from accountancy terminology, as a matter of tracking intellectual property, or what gradually became understood as ‘assets’. It means company logos, the logos of your customers which you have somewhere in your hard disk, image files, complete house styles, later the term was extended to any file designated for repeat jobs and for jobs which had to be repurposed for the web or any other publishing media. The intended software had to handle the complex ownership issues that were involved. That’s where asset management started - how to properly use digital files on which you actually have only partial ownership. I think there have been efforts in the software industry to move away from purely archiving systems and trying to use all these methods for reusing and repurposing digital material as also things which included production tracking, costing, financial matters which were involved for instance, in the rights in anything related to intellectual property. The term ‘digital asset management’ has been marked by prepress, it rapidly became the main issue in the media and multimedia industries, for the management of pages also in production, the storage of databases and large files aimed at multiple ways of publishing. So there has been a time a few years back when editorial management, advertisements, tracking systems took on the label and with the integration of functionalities in different software applications, the lines increasingly blurred. What got lost in the process is that to date, I think there is no single system in the market that actually manages intellectual property of digital assets. And that’s a remark that may be made about all process-integrating software, which is that none of them really cover the entire process they are intended to cover. . .

Digital Proofing

R.S. Dugal

We used to live in a very cozy world not very long ago, when everything was proprietary. You had the entire colour system from one vendor, the scanner, the output device, the colour management. Then we started having a multi-vendor situation taking scanners from one vendor, imagesetters from another vendor, computers from a third vendor and software from a fourth vendor. Colour is perhaps the most difficult and yet the easiest thing to understand. All of us see colour everyday. But the perception is so different. Things are quite complicated with the colour issues when it comes to prepress, and now we are making things even more difficult.

The idea of the global network is working simultaneously, in parallel in a virtual one- room environment. The moment you want to do that, you are talking in terms of remote soft proofing. I am doing a job sitting in Mumbai, my client is in New York, so first he should be able to proof the job remotely in New York, and it has to be soft proof initially. A soft proof means he should be able to proof it on the monitor of his computer. Then you’re looking at remote hardcopy proof. When you’re looking at a complete scenario of prepress, we start with origination that could be creative artists, visualisers, design agencies, advertising agencies. We then come into a traditional area of prepress, which is scanners, imagesetters, etc., we come into printing and once we come into printing or at the prepress level you find errors. If you find them at the prepress level they have to go back to the original stage to be able to rectify those errors. Once you’ve printed out a document and you find there is a problem, you have to go back to the origination stage to correct that problem. The earlier in the production cycle you are able to correct a problem, the lesser are your cost overruns. Hence it is extremely important that when you are moving out your production to multiple locations, you have to have the concept of digital proofing.

Digital proofing is becoming important for another reason - CtP is around the corner, it may be a few years away for some of us and eventually all of us to adopt CtP. Once it comes to CtP, the digital proof will become mandatory. Today, you take out the films, you do your press proofs, your progressive proofs, you find something is wrong, go back to your system, make the corrections, take out the films and the proof once again. In the same context if you are talking about even a digital proof locally, you eliminate that additional process. So whenever we are talking about a concept from an idea to a product, this is the cycle of the print production analysis that we are doing; the biggest productivity gain is achieved if the process is managed correctly. You would need proofs at multiple stages. A designer has designed his roughs, he wants a proof at that stage with his designer proofs. You want to release an advertisement in the newspaper, which insists on the proofs coming out along with the advertisements. This is what is called DCP-a digital contract proof.

Remote proofing is becoming important. If you look at digital delivery of advertisements, remote proofing is important. When you want to do an export project, remote proofing becomes even more important. Because somebody sitting at the remote site, as early or as often in the stage as possible, has to be able to see and correct the proof, and give you his inputs. I am going to discuss later in the presentation an Internet- based solution. Because if you use high-resolution files and have a 200 MB page which is not unusual in the prepress world, how do you do remote proofing of that page. On normal ISDN lines it could take 10 hours to download a page like that. So there are technologies available today which allow you to do remote proofing of such pages.

As I said, there is increasing need for remote proofing, driven by faster turnarounds, shorter runs and the distribute-and-print scenario. Traditionally, the norm has been to print and distribute-print and distribute only as many copies of the job as required. Now the paradigm is changing. Now you put the number of pages on a CD or on a website - you first ‘distribute’ the information, and once the recipient goes through the information and wants to print only a few pages of the entire information available, he should be able to do that. This is complemented by growing telecommunication abilities. Two years ago there wasn’t even a possibility of talking about remote proofing. It wasn’t even possible that at 14.4 KBPS or 9.6 KBPS I could ring something on a modem and hold my communication lines for half an hour. Today people in India are already talking about 2 MBPS lines, 64 KBPS lines, 128 KBPS lines. We’re talking about bigger bandwidths. With the bandwidths on the telecommunication lines becoming affordable, we are actually getting wired into a global village. One of the biggest problems India faces to an extent, is the lack of a proper telecommunication network to get wired into a global village. . .

Workflow and CtP for Commercial Printing

Les Bovenlander

We’re going to look at some workflow issues and in some of them I’ll touch again on proofing and what’s changing in this environment today, I’ll give you a quick industry snapshot. In this book that I’ve been reading it says, "In the great scheme of digital prepress, workflow isn’t just something, it’s the only thing. Workflow isn’t just two cables on the ends, it’s the totality of communication, transportation and productivity of and among people, machines and programmes."- Frank J. Romano, M.B. Carrey [Workflow Re-engineering].

There’s two parts to workflow. The first part is the technical part - the equipment, the configuration, how you put it together, what it consists of, how many bits, bytes and megabytes you can output, etc. The second part is how you structure your workflow, how you accept your work, how you do your file checking, how you deal with your customer, and so on, how does the job come into your plant and go through the process of being produced. You have all the production phases going through to film, and that’s paged film, where we output individual pages or spreads, you have now computer-to-plate, outputting fully imposed spreads, punched, ready to go directly to plate. They call it computer-to-film or CtF, I’ll refer to it sometimes as ‘plate-ready film’, fully imposed and punched. We’re moving faster and faster towards a computer-to-plate (CtP) environment. Many CtP sites are being installed. We’ve seen the start of the digital printing environment, we’re talking about the digital proofing environment, the CD-ROM and we also have Internet publishing. So, the business is diversifying away from conventional printing, although we have to still streamline our prepress production and our print business.

What we’re finding is that the prepress segment has been the most vulnerable player over the last few years in the graphic arts chain. Why? Because printers are tending to move more towards impositioning for CtP. A majority of the printers in the US have prepress. In Europe I think it’s about 60%. Where do we get the highest level of productivity going if we’re a prepress house? One of the main aspects is workflow management, digitising the process and the workflow management. How can you link to your customers? You have to create a workflow that can lock the customer to you, providing him services - communications, Internet-based proofing, remote hardcopy proofing on site. There are many companies that are doing this, they provide the asset management. We put in a server, you can connect to this server, we download low resolution pictures automatically. You’re managing all the high-resolution data for that company, and he can access and take away the low resolution pictures. Supply them the plug-ins for the computer and they can connect to a server and view high-resolution images.

The same can be done with hardcopy proofing, by installing hardcopy proofing devices on site. This way you are giving them faster turnaround times and database management. So through workflow management, giving them new services, you bring them closer to you and this is creating much higher efficiency and productivity within your own site as well. We’re looking at all this from a CtP angle so if you are a prepress house supplying CtP services, you need to form a strong alliance with printers in a region because you need delivery of contract and imposition proofs and plates. You’re supplying plates to a printer which have to be correct. So you have to have strong communication with the printer. You’re very sensitive to plate sizes and you have to constantly liason with the printers that you will supply to because you will have various plate sizes, a variety of punch combinations. If you’re a prepress house, you have to consider workflow issues of what you are getting into with the CtP environment. If you’re looking at CIP3 files, the output of data which can be used for setting up the press, this is a service. Each press requires the PPF file suited to their particular type of press. So you have multiple output of CIP3 files. . .