6th Annual Technology Conference

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

Advances in offset press technology

K. Radhakrishnan

I am basically going to talk to you about colour management in production. We have devices in prepress to control colour, but the question is, how do we do that in the pressroom.

What is the problem as far as colour management is concerned?

Let us look at the colour space of an average monitor. A different monitor may have an entirely different colour space. In prepress you have special tools-calibration tools to calibrate the scanner, the question is, how do we control colour in the pressroom, how do we continue to control colour after it has been transferred from prepress. We have a few solutions. The first is, the importance of press standardisation

Yet another initiative to control colour in the pressroom is the spectrophotometric measurement and analysis of a sheet. The operator keeps the sheet and through the CPC-24 scans the sheet first in one direction and then in the other direction and it is being taken in by the monitor and the operator flips it over because it is a 4x4 job and again the process is repeated. What is happening here is that you are taking an OK sheet or an approved proof by the customer and putting on the CPC-24 and you are measuring the colour spectrophotometrically in the illuminance, chroma and hue (LAB) format and storing these values as the target values. You take the first pull, put it on the CPC-24 and measure it again. This device will look at the Delta or the change and will automatically send signals to the particular ink zone locations of the printing units in the press where the ink has to be increased or decreased. This is extremely crucial especially for packaging printers where colour consistency is important.

What is the future? The future is that we are now going to give the reference values straight from the prepress itself.

Print colour management (PCM) is another interesting concept, which is still in the development stages but we hope to show it at Drupa. You have a fingerprint of each printing press, using the analysis of a printed test sheet and integrating the prepress to the press completely. How is this done? In your workflow you have the prepress, CtP, a test forme, a printing press, the CPC-24, and then the data storage. First you take a sample test forme which we give you and scan it in your prepress and plate it either in the conventional way or through CtP and then print the test forme. Scan the test forme using the spectrophotometric device and measure the LAB values. We are coming out with the print colour management software through which we will combine the CMYK information and the LAB values and create an ICC profile for the press. This ICC profile is actually being sent back to the prepress, completing the loop, so that whenever the prepress person is sending that job to that particular press, he would use that ICC profile which will have all the interpretations for the press-how the press behaves, what is its dot gain, ink characteristic curve, fountain solution curve, so that the prepress is being optimised for excellent results on the press because we are fingerprinting the press. . .

Digital Printing - A User Presentation

K. Balaji

Digital printing is a means of communication, just as all other forms of printing are, but we often forget what the real purpose of the printed word is, it is actually to communicate. We have to define what digital printing is. It is a printing method that transfers digitised text and images from the computer directly to paper or any other substrate on a digital press. I understand that definitions can be controversial.

One definition says that a digital press must be one that is capable of producing variable data.

What are the features and benefits of digital printing? First of course, is the speed. We have a great deal of flexibility first in the form of formats because we can vary signature lengths. The person who receives the communication is not bothered whether you've printed it by offset or digital as long as it serves the purpose. As far as costs, since you print only what you need, you have lower inventories and therefore lower costs. And because you can print quite fast and save time, you can save money. The most notable feature and benefit of digital printing is personalisation and the potential for personalisation is enormous. The response rates for mailings with personalisation are said to be 8-10 times higher.

Who decides what print should be ordered, how it should be done, and at what costs? Should it be the print user? It would be ideal if the print user can decide because he knows exactly what he needs. Is it the print buyer? Or worst of all, should it be the accountant? Most often it's the accountant and we're in trouble. We're talking about speed of printing and the speed of turnaround time, but what is the use of printing out-of-date information. So, inorder to get the best out of digital printing, we must have information in words and pictures that is current and up to date, otherwise there is no sense in talking about speed. How good is the quality of that information? Garbage in, garbage out is as true for digital printing as it is for offset or any other form of printing.

Where do we stand today? Digital printing is not easy. As I said before, the tolerances for printing conditions are fairly narrow and the digital printing press is delicate unlike an offset press. In the past year or so we have done work for 125 customers, working on a wide variety of jobs. We've had tremendous competition from offset particularly because this has been a time of low volumes for the industry in general and offset printers have been willing to slash rates and do very small print runs just to keep some work going in the press. Digital printing I firmly believe, does not replace offset and customers must be provided with a compelling reason to use digital printing, not to use it just as another printing method. They must see and derive some benefit from it, otherwise there's no point in even asking. . .

Packaging Preproduction - An Integrated Approach to Packaging Design

Nick Price

My presentation is divided into three sections. First of all, we're looking at the packaging market in transition, what's happening in the packaging market that's affecting vendors, customers, printers and product suppliers on a day-to-day basis. Secondly we'll look at the next generation of workflow solutions-products that can supply a workflow solution along with these new changes. And thirdly, we'll look at the question, 'Why dedicated prepress for packaging?'

First, the packaging market in transition. There have been a lot of changes over the last five years. New business structures have been evolving; there is a lot of consolidation in companies and globalisation with not only vendors but also printing companies; distributed designer manufacturing, so the printer may not be actually doing the design; the client-supplier network with multiple partners, so we have to work with other different people, file transfer becomes very important, open files that can be opened in any system. There are shorter design creation times so the customers want their designs yesterday, they cannot wait a week, two weeks, three weeks for the new designs. A lot of mergers and acquisitions are creating very diverse companies with a broad variety of products and services, not only packaging. There are larger central hubs with smaller remote sites. ISDNing of files is common; prepress is done in one city, the printing is done in another. Converters are adopting CtP technology very quickly also in India. So we can no longer avoid the digital workflow, supported by increasing computing power and driven by Internet data communications. Consumer product companies are really the driving force in all this; they are pushing the quality and the technology. The industry is demanding more sophisticated packaging designs.

The trend in packaging specifically is to convert gravure and offset packaging jobs to flexo because we can achieve the quality. The traditional packaging supply chain is also changing. We have the product company at the top, conventionally they were talking to the design bureaus, who were then looking at prepress and also printing. So this was a very linear structure. The supply chain now, according to what I call 'Emerging Design and Manufacturing Workflow', has the product company sitting in the middle as the main player, the CAD/CAM design of the actual packaging layout and the design bureau are both in communication with the product company. The prepress shop is also a main player. The prepress shops have to communicate with product companies as do the design bureaus. So it's a multi-faceted structure now. This means we have to be able to communicate with every single supplier in this chain. Not only in file formats and sending data, but also in the way of approach and presentation. We also have to take into consideration the distributed activities in the global operations. Compressed file formats are very important for sending over the Internet.

These new changes that have been happening in the industry over the past 5-10 years requires new software to take into consideration the changes. The consumer product company has an idea, from which we need to make the actual shape of the package itself ArtiosCAD is a software package for designing the engineering drawings of package layouts, step-and-repeat and automatic calculations of the cost. ArtiosCAD is basically the first step in the packaging workflow-it's for design of folding cartons and corrugated box shapes

Why a dedicated packaging workstation? Why not use a Mac or PC with conventional software? The choice is between desktop design or dedicated prepress. I would say that DTP software programmes are not prepress solutions. Why? In a dedicated prepress system we have certain things that we need to address. First of all, it must be targetted at multiple print processes. It must be able to understand what is flexo, offset, gravure, or silkscreen. It must be able to address problems on each of these different presses with the correct tools. DTP applications don't understand these presses, they don't understand printing. It must be capable of serving multiple markets-posters, newspapers, cartons, labels, corrugated and it must have the dedicated tools for packaging prepress. For example, a dedicated prepress system has to be open to every other system available-Postscript, EPS, PDF, Photoshop. . .

Web Offset Printing Issues including Maintenance

Purnendu Sen

Basically in a printing press, whether sheetfed or offset, all we are trying to do is, rotate some cylinders and control the rotation, achieve speed and perfection. The whole thing started with the science of rotation, the motion theory. There is rotary motion which is cylindrical, Oscillating motion-the ink rollers, there is centrifugal motion, which you see in plate lockup designs today. The Man Roland newspaper presses are designed with centrifugal motion and the forward propulsion which even today we are not using in printing presses.

For any object to be in motion you need energy. There are various forms of energy which we all know about, but mostly electrical energy is used in printing. Electrical energy has to be converted, for which we are using motors. The motors are of two types-AC motors and DC motors. Both the AC and DC motors are used in printing presses, AC motors are again of two types, slip ring and commutative type. In AC motors the whole thing revolves around the stator and the winder. An electromagnetic field is created, it is thirsting between the two magnetic fields with one trying to catch the other magnetic field.

Then came the AC commutator motors. In old crab trim machines, even in some Goss presses these motors are being used, where there are brushes which expand with friction and the speed is varied on that. On those commutator motors the speed is achieved by increasing or decreasing the width of those brushes. But these motors were extremely bulky and maintenance cost was very high. These motors are still being used by some printing machine manufacturers.

Then there is the slip ring motor, where there is a set of slip rings on the side being used along with the resistance. These motors are also used in print machines. It is very huge and produces a lot of heat and much more maintenance is required. The DC motor is used quite widely and is being used even today

Why shaftless presses? The shaftless presses have come for precision, for better control. The result is that we get better register, and less wastage. Why do you need a digital drive? How much do you need to control? The colour accuracy requirement is about 10 microns. If you have a cylinder circumference of 1 metre, the colour precision required per revolution of a cylinder is 1 lakh points. Along with this what comes into the picture is the speed at which you are printing. If you print at 10 metres per second, your required precision for correction of a cylinder revolution will be 1 micron per second. You cannot do that with analogue anymore, you have to have digital controls. How do we achieve this level of precision? The circumference of the motor has been divided at a right angle, because within a given circumference we want to divide the area into millions of parts, and what has been used here are the principles of trignometry of sine and cos. On the right angle two encoders are there which are measuring constantly. You have to have a defined angle inorder to measure. The difference is constant as is the digital information, it is not changing.

As far as digital drives are concerned, I will talk about ABB drives, MPS control, SDS-100, the control range is greater than 1:40,00,000. The high precision position measurement is extremely accurate, the cycle time position is 250 micro-second, high control dynamics, and the communication is through fibre optic cables. What I am trying to convey is that shaftless presses were designed basically to achieve better register, to have minimum wastage, to achieve greater speed and speed control, all through the digital control of the motions of the motors.

What are the changes? Pneumatics are becoming ever smaller, more system-compatible, powerful and multi-functional. Whenever you buy a pneumatic system, look for what is the coefficient figure of the material. The lower the coefficient figure, the better, which in layman terms means that your wear and tear will be less. Small printers can buy a training tool for as little as Rs 60,000, so that your press crew, your maintenance crew knows what kind of cylinders are available and how they work. This is a readymade kit

No press owner in India consults a civil engineer before he installs his press. To install a press properly you need a foundation. The Man [Roland] press used in the Times of India is a tower press. In this press at various points of the reelstand, the units, the folder and the superstructure, they are supposed to give you static and dynamic loads. Upto 1.5 mm per second vibration is allowed.

Maintenance issues can be divided into mechanical, electrical, operational, and strip-down maintenance, which is totally absent in the Indian scene. You have daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, half-yearly, and yearly maintenance. I feel in the Indian context where presses are not changed like in Europe, you need to have a major maintenance activity. No presses even today run without a mechanical and electrical engineer. The onus is put on the printer to provide the electrical and mechanical maintenance backup. But this kind of approach will not work in today's context. In electrical maintenance, there are certain things you need to do on a daily, weekly, fortnightly, and monthly basis. Motors are an area that need special attention. Under operational maintenance, it is very important to regularly check the shore hardness and the dia of the ink rollers. This is particularly necessary at the time of installing the new rollers. The shore hardness metre tells you the level of shore hardness in the rollers. We need to clean the dampening tank regularly as well. With repeated use, the dampening duct is filled with deposits and needs thorough cleaning. In fortnightly maintenance, if the zero setting of the ink ducts is not correct, it will charge either excess ink or less ink. For a given density or opening of the ink duct, you have to have a given setting. Under strip-down maintenance, you dissect the units. Folder maintenance is a major aspect. Do not allow people to touch your folder unnecessarily. So, the maintenance management as I call it, comes from manning and documenting your inventory. There has to be a proper scheduling, setting and adjustment of maintenance. . .

Digital Imaging for Gravure Cylinders

Jan Breiholdt

When we look to digital engraving for gravure, we first see systems that produce single packaging jobs. And if we want to bring a single element to a packaging job, to an engraving machine to produce cylinders for gravure, we have to pass through a few steps. The main step is producing the cylinder layout. This means that at this stage we must be capable of importing different data formats, because there are many different systems creating packaging jobs.

The objectives for digital engraving for gravure are: first of all import single repeats from any source, do a cylinder layout assembly, place register and control marks, and if you want you can have special features in a workstation where you can get the amount of time that this job will take on the engraving machine, or you can get additional information about the ink consumption. Other objectives are: outputting of engraving data-we see that most systems today are working with standardised TIFF data. Then we have the option to make a forme proof from this TIFF data to engrave the job, and to archive the digital data of the job.

There are different cylinder layout workstations available in the market-some working in a Unix environment, others which are Macintosh-compatible. The next step is the option to make a forme proof. The forme proof runs totally automatically so that there is no special operation that you have to do for it because the forme proof is controlled by job tickets.

After forme proofing, now finally we want to engrave. In the engravimg machine we have different ways to bring data to an engraving machine. Since we are working today in a totally open environment, this engraving machine can engrave from TIFF data, and this TIFF data may come from any system. But a supplier may also have his own solution. But please keep in mind that today engraving really means that you can engrave TIFF data whatever system they are coming from. A typical system configuration may look like this: you have the workstation where you create the cylinder layout, you export TIFF data, you have the forme proof which is created automatically if needed, you have a number of engraving machines and engrave. So the system of today has become very simple and the engraving machine of today is just an output device.

After engraving, people want to archive the job and archiving, working with standard data formats has become very easy. Standard equipment is used like optical disc, CD-ROMs, or DAT drives, you as the customer can decide what you want.

The automatic fast crossfeed is a feature that is coming in every contemporary digital engraving machine, where the areas on the cylinder where there is nothing to engrave, are automatically skipped. This area is about 20-30% on an average. Standard also today is the engraving in two modes-we have the helical mode on engraving machines, and we have the closed loop engraving. Helical engraving has an advantage, it maybe 10-20% faster than closed loop engraving. However, closed loop engraving is the more precise one. Productivity is a key issue when we are engraving in various modes. Other features of the engraving machines of today are, automatically a job is centred on a cylinder, in older machines you have to make it by hand to find the start position on the cylinder. The new machines measure the cylinder surface, they know the job size and then they position the job by themselves. Another feature of these machines is the automatic test cut. The test cut is calibrating the engraving system to the individual cylinder which in earlier times was a procedure that was controlled by the operator. Now, we have systems which are working with a camera that do this by themselves. The advantage is that the printing cylinder gets independent from the operator. With this system you have an objective measurement system and you get the same result each time.

Now I would like to talk about the job ticket workflow. We now know that we need a cylinder if we want to engrave and we need a cylinder layout, standard data format and a separated cylinder layout file inside. With this you could start engraving right away but you would have to specify some parameters-what screen, which angle, etc. This setup of the machine you can do at the job preparation station, where you key in all the values and create a job ticket. So, it's an electronic document that you give to the machine and from this document, the machine makes the setup. You can give special commands to the machine which tell the operator that he has to take care of something special which is displayed in the user interface. Some quality parameters and some functionality like mirroring or web shrinkage compensation is possible with an engraving machine. All these parameters are inside a job ticket. . .

Digital Presses - Variable and Non-variable

M. Lakshmi Narayan Rao

We live in an on-demand world today which is influencing every aspect of our lives. Every aspect of the service industry is being influenced by the on-demand syndrome. This is happening in the world of printing as well, where you are actually talking of cycle-time reductions, instantaneous turnarounds, etc. Another aspect one needs to look at is the kind of information glut that is flooding the market. There is a lot of information available because of which there is a dwindling reader or recipient attention span, and there are documents jostling for attention. This means that the solution is in customising the document. What do we mean by this? The solution is what is called variable data printing. But before we do that, let's spend some time on the technology trends. The widespread usage of the web is leading to an entity called the virtual document. What is the virtual document? A virtual document by nature can change all the time, it's very dynamic, it's customised for the individual. As a cyber document, it exists only in cyberspace until printed. What we mean by that is, it does not occupy a physical space and can be used only when needed. The printed version is a record of the state of the document at that moment. Virtual documents are actually leading to online catalogues which in future would mean customised information. You could even print a customised catalogue when and where you wish.

On-demand printing is adapted rapidly by the market because of its flexibility in terms of the procedures, and at the point of need of information. Print only what you need when you need it, it makes high-quality colour widely accessible, and takes advantage of platform-independent documents which can be viewed or printed. What is variable data printing? In the case of the same kind of information reaching customers where the profile of each customer or reader is different, how can variable data printing help in disseminating that information? Variable data printing personalises the information for each reader, is platform and application-independent, conforms to the existing workflow, prints documents at engine speed. Variable data printing incorporates advanced digital printing technology to merge a master page which has constant elements like headlines, high-resolution images, logos, etc., with other information that changes on a page-to-page basis. The variable elements are inserted automatically from a database at print time and can include black and white and coloured text and even pictures and charts. Variable data printing let's you communicate with real-time colour images in a way that saves time and provides you with the flexibility of printing customised information at print engine speeds.

A major benefit of variable data printing is its targeted approach. The tools that come in with these solutions are the colour management tools for providing device-to-device consistency, web tools for the Internet, Postscript 3 and PDF printing. These solutions come with Adobe Postscript Level 3 support. It's a platform-independent graphical, user interface, from the desktop to the press it is the same interface, it has JAVA-based remote management utilities over LAN, WAN and the web, which means you could actually be proofing half a globe away. The opportunity is in the new business areas of e-commerce and services, you could have preflighting over the net before you send a job. The 'paperless office' isn't coming, but the print has changed forever. . .

Gravure Press Update

Jan Breiholdt

For gravure, computer-to-cylinder is the equivalent technology as is CtP for offset and flexo. Adobe job tickets is a technology that is coming now. How does this work? We have developed a tool which we call the Job Ticket Editor. It's a tool where you can permatrise all the settings that you need for the complete workflow-for the cylinder layout, for the forme proof, and also for the engraving machine. All the parameters that are needed for this single production station, can be set up on a Macintosh or a PC. There are the general parameters like how many colours, the job size, what quality at the engraving machine, test cut data and layout, these are for the proof device to give them information how to proof the job, and create the job ticket. What is a job ticket? It is basically an ASCII file and you find a lit of all the parameters that you have set on the Job Ticket Editor. You assign each job ticket to one TIFF separation, and this is what you give to the engraving machine. When you want to proof, the proof will read the job ticket. Even the cylinder layout workstation at the very beginning of the process, communicates with this job ticket. After having created all the TIFF files, exporting them, and sending them to the forme proof, the forme proof has to know how to print for example, special colours. Since these devices come with CMYK colours, the special colours have to be simulated. It gets the information on how to simulate a special colour out of the job ticket. The information is written from the cylinder layout workstation directly into the job ticket and the forme proof reads it from the job ticket. So its' not a one-way communication, but worktations communicate with each other. And finally, the engraving machine takes the information about where to perform a fast forward, and this information is also written by the cylinder layout workstation by the job ticket. So, we can control the complete workflow by this job ticket.

There is one other very interesting approach that is coming up with the job ticket. People in Europe are using production planning systems. This means that an order for cylinders is keyed in into the production system just once and now it is possible to create a fully automatic job ticket from the production planning system. When I produce cylinders I can sample information-who did the job, on which workstation was the job done, how long did it take-all this information I can collect also in the job ticket and after the production is finished, I get all the information back via the Job Ticket Editor through an interface into the production control system. So I have very good control, and I can calculate the job, and later if I face problems with a job, I can look into this system and see in which station it was done, who did it and how long did it take. All the communication, and the production planning will become digital in the future, all networked to each other.

Sleeve technology seems to be very static, limited to special cylinder dimensions. But the development of polymer-based lightweight cylinders is an interesting phenomenon. This is not something new, people have been working on it for the last several years, and it is expected that in the near future there will be some systems that will have quite interesting results. The main advantage of these cylinders is that they are very light. So you can easily send them to customers, you can easily store them, and you can more easily produce polymer-based cylinders. If we look to other technologies like the laser engraving, this polymer-based cylinder could be much easier to engrave directly from the laser than a copper cylinder today.

We have some trends like inline colour monitoring, drying systems, solvent abatement inks, electrostatic assist in digital printing. Inline colour monitoring. This system was introduced for the first time at the conference of the European Rotogravure Association in Dublin last month. What we have today is registration monitoring, web viewing, automatic defect detection, and viscosity control. The inline colour monitoring is a new development. If somebody prints today, and he wants to measure the colour, whether it's still the same or not, he has to take a sample and measure it. With inline colour monitoring we can do it online. The people who invented it took a video camera, and with it you take an image of that packaging job on the web which you know is okay, let's call it a master. During production, the video camera takes pictures sporadically, and visualises certain areas on the image that it takes and measures in the LAB colour space and calculates the Delta E value between the master and the actual image. . .

Automation Options in the Pressroom

S. Krishna Kumar

I am going to talk about a couple of automation possibilities in the printing press area, because that is one area which is important when we go ahead with the modernisation and upgradation of technology, and one of the side-effects is automation of the processes and the maintenance

The basic need for an ink transfer system arises from the requirement to avoid wastage and spillage of inks, to improve the productivity of the machines and the manpower involved, and better housekeeping and safety. How does this work? The ink transfer system is basically a pump-pneumatic or electrical-with certain accessories to ensure that the ink is capable of being sucked into the pump and then delivered to the ducts, and some further attachments like pipes, valves, fittings, and optional accessories to make it a complete automatic unit. The pump can be used directly on a barrel containing inks. It is a pneumatic pump which is simple to operate and at the same time effective in pumping the inks. The actual unit has got an ad motor which is the drive, and a pump which pumps the ink. The salient features of this pump include the ability to pump the ink without additional priming, and it wipes the ink from the valves so that there are no leftovers and this process of the ink being pumped fully, is controlled pneumatically so that what you essentially have is a clean and effective transfer of inks. A typical installation comprises pumps used for different colours on a barrel, and the unit is laid out on the machine.

We now move on to the issue of centralised lubrication. This possibility comes out of the normal maintenance chore when you are able to clean the machine, and lubricate-the Koreans and Japanese have the simple philosophy of clean, lubricate, check and reset by which they claim that they are able to increase the productivity to a very large extent. What you are doing today is that you lubricate a bearing in a machine individually once a week, once a fortnight, or once a month. What can be looked into is getting this process done through an automatic mechanism or equipment, which we call centralised because the entire source of lubricant supply is centralised from a single point. The main objective is to ensure that the lubricant is delivered effectively and efficiently, you do the lubrication and greasing of all the bearings, reduce human intervention-we're not saying that there will be no requirement of people, it does entail human presence in terms of checking the workability of the units and the equipment- although we can hook it up to mechanical control-since you would like to have increased machine operation rather than shutting it down for such routine maintenance tasks. . .

CIP3 in Prepress and Press

Les Bovenlander

Basically, CIP3 is the 'International Cooperation for the Integration of Prepress, Press and Postpress'. Why did we go for CIP3, what is CIP3 all about? We're continuing the digital evolution, we're taking all the aspects of prepress-from digital impositioning and we're using the data further downstream. Why? To use digital data to increase the efficiency of the operation. The globalisation of the graphic arts business is going to happen more and more through communications. What this means is that you're getting more and more possibilities of import and export work, and to do this we need to increase the efficiency and productivity, faster turnaround times, etc. You know how the business is changing-we're downsizing, just-in-time production, instant communications, etc. What this means is that those of us who are in prepress, publishing, printing, cannot ignore this, we have to change together with it. CIP3 is one of these things, it's a small part of the entire workflow process, but it plays a very big role.

We know about the process changes not only in prepress, but in the advent of digital printing, and the short-run colour aspect. All the processes are changing, how do we link all this digital information together to increase efficiency and productivity? We're integrating all the elements from prepress, press and postpress, so the CIP3 group was started at Drupa in 1995 by a core group of ten graphic arts and printing companies to try to make a uniform format of passing this information and all this information, generally speaking comes from digital impositioning. Today we're working with the PJTF developments and also web developments. The CIP3 group has specified the print production format (PPF), and the overall goal was to integrate all the different elements of production, create more efficiency and productivity, it's part of another acronym in the industry-CIM (computer-integrated manufacturing). It's basically turning your operation into a production line.

As far as the contents of CIP3 are concerned, the first thing we're looking at is the administration data. The administration data is part of the PJTF story, which is further on in the implementation. But administration data generally relates to the imposition-what is the imposition, what flat it is, what section it belongs to, the naming of that imposition flat is in the same way today as you write it on the foil, according to the PPF file format. Transfer curves are the means to adjust this information that we get to allow for dot gains, etc. We apply these transfer curves to the files before sending them to the press. There are register marks for automatic registration because many companies and vendors have automatic registration on the presses, so we have the ability to put in these automatic registration marks which are generated in the impositioning, but have to be read from the PPF files.

If we look at another aspect called private data, what we've done in the initiation of CIP3 with the PPF format is that we've left open parameters where individual companies can stylise, can put their oadded value information into this PPF format. The PPF format remains constant so I can move it around from one vendor to another, but I can add specific information to it when it gets to my system . . .