Computer-to-plate is a reality -- just not at many U.S. papers

Like a football fan for a second-tier team, Rick Masters was always waiting for next year. But instead of shouting "Boola Boola" and waving team colors, Masters was rooting for computer-to-plate to take off. This year, he's ready again. "I look for CTP to take off in 2000," he said, "but I've been saying that for years."

Like pagination, cold type and a host of other technological advances in newspapering, being able to generate press plates without any of the paste-up or engraving processes -- going from newsroom and advertising computers direct to plate -- has been about five years away for longer than most of us care to think about. But it appears as if Masters, the product manager for Melbourne, Fla.-based Harris Publishing System Corp.'s MaxWorkFlow product, is going to see his team get hot.

Al Brunner, vice president for operations at Autologic Information International of Thousand Oaks, Calif., said CTP is getting closer in the United States.

"What's happening is that most of the newspaper groups are allowing specific sites to investigate and proceed with CTP and report back what's happening," Brunner said.

"CTP is a reality in Europe," Brunner said, "and becoming a reality in South America."

In the United States, pricing pressures, concerns about plate longevity and lack of a digital workflow have long held back CTP. In Europe, those concerns are minimized, Brunner said.

"Plate pricing is comparable to that of normal plates, page counts are lower and more places are ready for it," he said.

CTP plates in the United States cost far more than regular plates, and newspapers don't like paying high prices for consumables. In Europe, regular plates are about as expensive as those needed for CTP, Brunner said. European papers often have shorter press runs and are technologically more advanced than their U.S. brethren, making the process a viable alternative.

Pagination, the other newspaper technology that "is just five years away," is a key piece in making computer-to-plate work. Operations that are still doing paste-up are unlikely to have the ability to go CTP.

Just as pagination forced editors to pay attention to folios, zone designators and a host of things that used to be done in pre-press, CTP forces people upstream to pay attention to items that normally were a pressroom function.

"With pagination, we had to worry about the headers and all the little stuff. A lot of things flowed upstream that the news department had to know about," Michael Rosen, group director for publishing systems at the New York Times, said.

"CTP exacerbated that," he said. "There were problems that the newsroom made changes, for zones or whatever, and that made them become much more entwined with the press operations."

The Times already had a group that met weekly to tackle issues related to pagination of myriad sections and output to the nationwide network of printing plants. "For full pagination, we created a group that met every week," Rosen said. "When we went CTP, we had to include press people and then folks from imposition in the meetings."

Digital workflow
Those meetings were just one step in managing the workflow. For CTP to work, not only does a paper have to be digital from end-to-end, it has to have processes in place to manage the workflow from ad order input and ad tracking, to page layout and beyond.

"The whole digital workflow is the way to go," according to Mike Phillips, national accounts manager at plate-maker Agfa Corp. of Wilmington, Mass. "You have to be able to track things and move them through the system."

Why go through all the trouble to go CTP? For Jerry Quinn, production director at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore., there were a number of reasons to go CTP, but one result stands out.

"Ballpark figure, it's about three or four minutes from the time someone hits the 'print' button until a plate drops out," Quinn said. "It allows the newsroom later deadlines and more pages on deadline. In the old days, we had stringent deadlines for color, but now they are right on deadline with the rest."

Yes, there are other advantages, but giving a newsroom more time to put out a better product is always a good idea (though you still may need to twist a few arms to get them to actually meet the new deadlines).

The other advantages can have a distinct effect on an operation's bottom line, too.

"The best payback is you buy more time for deadline," AII's Brunner said. "You keep the classified times open later, later sports and late breaking stories. But also, the plates ink up faster and you throw away fewer copies, especially if you have ink presets. If you take that digital dot information and can send it to the pressroom, the pressman does not have to sit there with the press revolving, fiddling around with ink fountains. You are using the dot original, eliminating dot gain, and that drives quality up and that makes everybody happy."

Masters at Harris said it's simple. "The make-ready on the press is better because the press comes into registration faster, you cut down on processes, you cut down on people and you can save time."

Getting there is not so simple, however.

"First off, computer-to-plate really will not work in a publishing environment that is not totally paginated," said Dennis Nierman, president of Monotype Systems of Rolling Meadows, Ill. "Second, you may have a reduction in staff in the composing room, but that often is offset by increases in Information Technology departments."

Nierman, like many others in the industry, said being fully paginated was an important piece, but only one piece.

"Before in advertising, you had the little manila envelope holding parts of the ads," Nierman said, "but you couldn't keep track of it so you started getting in to ad-tracking systems. Now, with the zones, 24-hour papers, morning and afternoon editions and everything else going on, you've got to get into page-tracking systems."

Rethink workflow
And page-tracking systems are only the start.

"This requires you to rethink workflow, more reporting through the process, more controls up through the pagination process," Masters said. "You need more digital control processes and more people working on them."

And, just as pagination required changes and tools to track everything, moving the plate-making process from the realm of the physical to the netherworld of ones and zeros requires even more tools to track everything.

Masters had a company called Total Systems Engineering, based in Louisville, Ky., that had output management tools. In 1999, he sold to Harris, which uses those tools as the core of MaxWorkFlow to provide a visual method of setting up, controlling and reporting on page flow through the production process.

"You hear people clamoring more for reporting," Masters said. "They need to know that something RIPs [raster image processors], that the imposition is correct, that plates are out of the processor as far upstream as possible. They need to know that the yellow plate is on the press but you're waiting for the black or whatever. If you have a standalone RIP or imposition package or whatever, you need to tie them all together to do this."

"You can't go CTP without addressing workflow," Brunner said. "You must have things in place, things like naming conventions so you know what you're looking at, especially if you're replating later in a press run."

Masters said the cost benefits and improved control systems that are a part of CTP are pushing it -- finally -- to the forefront. "You've got Usa Today, Investors Business Daily and the [New York] Times all working with it, putting in bits and pieces."

You may notice that Masters' list of papers are among those that print in remote sites. The processes in place at remote sites are usually well suited for conversion to CTP.

"It's better for remote sites, if only because they are used to just taking plates," Brunner said. "They are used to dealing at the page level regardless of how it gets there. The dot has already been formed."

"If it's involved with building a new facility or a remote facility," Monotype's Nierman said, "there is an economic payback. You can see in the numbers that you have a reduction in people in an environment by taking out a typesetter system and putting in a CTP system."

Cost, implementation factor
The cost of plates has been a significant factor in holding back CTP in the States.

"Our plates are 2¢ times more expensive than they were before," Quinn said, a number that makes purchasing agents -- and publishers -- sit up and take notice. Unlike the New York Times, the Statesman Journal doesn't let the editors send the plates to the plate-maker.

"Production releases all pages," Quinn said. "When the newsroom releases a page it pops up on our status monitor downstairs, and we decide where it goes and hit the print button."

But before they hit the "print" button, one final check is made of the page. "When a plate costs $2.27 -- more than $4 for a double -- you want to have a good proofing system. You don't want to use a plate for a proof. You want them right the first time."

To ensure they are right the first time, Quinn has scattered paper-proofing machines all over the paper's offices. And just before hitting that final "print" button, his department makes a reduced proof of the page and checks it. "We output miniatures of all the pages including ads," he said, "and take one more final look."

There are, of course, other things to worry about. Even in papers that are fully paginated, those pesky advertisers like to do things their own way, often delivering camera-ready ads right on deadline. And it's kind of hard to deal with camera-ready ads without a camera.

"We've got two Tecsa scanners to get those ads in the paper now," Quinn said. "At a lot of papers, that would be a significant factor."

Gone from the equation is much of the equipment that used to populate production. "We've eliminated our old Spartan page camera completely," he said. "We have kept our old plate line and conventional image-setters for backup, but they are shut off. We used to think that stuff was fast, but now we hate to use it. It's like watching grass grow."

It also matters how many plates a site currently makes from one piece of film.

"We're running a Goss Metro press, and on our setup, that's one plate," Quinn said. AII's Brunner said that for a site making a single plate, it was a smart move to switch to CTP, assuming the other pieces of the puzzle were in place.

"It's a no-brainer if you use one plate per piece of film," he said. "Two is OK, three is a push and four is the upper limit."

A lot of papers are experimenting with CTP, putting in small systems and running parallel, trying to get a feel of how it works and what else in the production process needs to be changed. And suppliers and newspapers alike foresee reduced costs for plates as demand goes up and suppliers increase production to accommodate it.

Until then, many newspapers seem willing to live with it. Like the newspaper photo departments going through their own conversion from film to digital, the extra costs of going CTP add up. And like photo departments, Quinn, said it was worth it.

"It was more than offset by film and chemistry and payroll savings," he said. "When it's all over, the camera department will be gone, and we will have -- through attrition -- reduced the number of employees by three. And I'm sure the newsroom is happier with the more relaxed deadlines."

-- S.E.B.