Strip mall (top): The DynaStrip software from Dynagram Software is versatile; as a company rep says, 'Anything you can put on a light table, you can put in there.'
Strip tease (bottom): Agfa's Intellinet product runs on Windows NT and was designed for the newspaper industry specifically.
Stripping table replaced by software for page imposition
LAS VEGAS -- Imposition.
OK, so it is not as dramatic as Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, but "imposition" popped up like "plastics" at NEXPO '99, with suppliers rolling out solutions to problems that couldn't be addressed a few years ago.Changes in platemaking equipment, the advent of computer-to-plate and the demand for high-quality printing (both color and black-and-white) have ignited demand for something that can properly position pages for a press while saving time in the production cycle.
That something is imposition -- or page-pairing -- software.
Pairing pages is not new. Newsrooms and designers lay out pages in what is called "readers' spreads," where Page 2 is next to Page 3, Page 4 is next to Page 5 and so on through a section. But composing rooms -- especially when dealing with tabloid-sized products -- often pasted up in "printers' spreads." For example, a 32-page section would have Page 1 pasted up alongside Page 32, Page 2 alongside Page 31 and so on.
Since most platemakers were the size of a single broadsheet page, this was critical only on tabloid products where the printers' spread could -- indeed, had to -- fit on one plate. Working in printers' spreads allowed the platemaking department to burn a plate just once, without cutting up negatives and stripping them into the proper order.
But many platemakers now can handle double trucks, where two broadsheet pages fit on one plate. If the product is a tabloid, it can handle four pages, with some of them rotated to accommodate the different positions on press while still printing right side up for the reader.
When you throw in TV books, advertising circulars and other smaller products, the need to automate the page layout functions becomes critical. Factor in pagination and computer-to-plate -- where a newsroom may be the only arbiter of what goes where -- and you have a recipe for disaster.
Lloyd Starr of DK&A Inc. of San Diego, makers of the imposition software INposition, said cost and quality were affected by the change.
"It used to be, you output to an imagesetter," Starr said. "Then you manually cut this together and arranged the pages on a light table. You built a plate in film, arranging the pages as needed. The people who did this were skilled and cost a lot of money."
Those people were occasionally undoing or redoing work that often had already been done in a computer and -- no matter how hard they tried -- pages would not be as straight as if they had come out of an imagesetter. Because the problems were acute only for tabs, there wasn't much of a market for solutions.
That was Then.
"What you've got now are imagers that will automatically image a double truck page," said Robert Hacker, the quality guru and professor emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology and president of Robert G. Hacker and Associates of Rochester, N.Y. "You can make two pages at one pass.
"With these double-wide pages, you can come out with everything imposed and you don't need to do all that stuff in the pagination system," he said. "As the technology gets more sophisticated, you can do more with this stuff. Page imposition becomes a more useful piece of software."
Save time, improve quality
James Haggarty, a production consultant based in Duluth, Minn., said page pairing helps squeeze time out of production cycles, cycles that are being compressed by the need to produce more products while still delivering the paper earlier.Imposition software also improves quality.
"Page pairing software means you can get double-truck plates, you can standardize settings and just clean up lots of things that can go wrong," Haggarty said. "I like the idea that double truck or side-by-side pages move as a single unit on the press. I now have much better control over what's going on."
That additional control means press setup and registration is faster and more accurate.
"You can affect color registration on press," Haggarty said. "Things don't slip as much, and it will tighten up registration considerably."
But page pairing nowadays is more than just matching pages with the press position and cleaning up registration. Imposition software makes it possible to store page furniture that can be automatically added to plates, as well as control ad or news zoning, at the raster image processor (RIP).
"Page pairing is basic imposition," said Frank O'Hearn, of Monotype Systems Inc. of Rolling Meadows, Ill. "But we now take it beyond that.
"For TV books, you do four-up where you rotate the pages 180 degrees to get the right orientation," he said. "Obviously, people used to paste those up. Now we use bitmaps and use page names to do that. But we can now add furniture to the plates -- gray bars, scanner bars, registration marks, all the stuff you need to print."
Monotype offers Print Express, its page pairing software, which allows the pairing of different types of files from different sources, a feature common to most of the new systems. It starts with basic page-pairing and adds features as you go along, said David Hedgeland, deputy managing director of Monotype.
"We're looking at how we can take what newspapers already have and broaden that," Hedgeland said. "We do page pairing, which pages are color, which go where and that sort of thing. Page imposition has a nice graphic display where the pages go through various stages of production and can be monitored."
Better than black magic
The setup of Print Express is similar to other page imposition packages on the market, using a graphical user interface and templates to choose page position, set up the page-naming scheme and handle the various editions and press packages that a user might see."It's pretty straightforward, really," said Nigel Clowes, Monotype technical support manager. Clowes described a process that seemed a cross between programming and black magic, running on a Sun server.
"I use the page pairing editor to set things up," he said, "and there are a couple of other things going on behind the screen, some weird and wonderful stuff the programmers do. We enter the things that don't change once it's done, and variables for the things that do."
The things that don't change are items such as basic page furniture like gray bars and registration marks. Things that do vary include things like publication date, page count, the edition or zone, and similar day-to-day information.
"I monitor the system, looking for certain things," Clowes said. "I trigger off elements within the name, using a standard naming convention determined by the newspaper. I'm looking for things like the default publication abbreviation, the publication date and edition codes.
"When I find them, the page pairer sends it to the merger, which in turn looks for the match. If it finds a match, it sends it to the bitmap pairer. If there's no match, it says it's not for me and throws it away."
Quebec-based Dynagram Software was drawing quite a bit of interest in its imposition package, DynaStrip. "Anything you can put on a light table, you can put in there," said David Brannan, Dynagram's sales manager.
"I start with a job name and select a folder where I want the job," Brannan said. "I go to the design area where I have my toolbars and define a sheet, including such things as gutter spread. The software monitors the folder for pages and, when pages show up, they are paired, and finished sheets are sent to the RIP."
Brannan said the DynaStrip package, which runs on Windows NT/95/98, works with files from Quark XPress, WordPerfect and Miles33, among others. It works best when files are numbered so the extension includes the page number -- myfile.1 is page 1, myfile.5-10 contains pages 5 through 10, and so on. There are provisions for handling other naming conventions or products where the total number of pages is not known.
Autologic Information International Inc. of Thousand Oaks, Calif., has a product similar to Monotype's Print Express, running on a Windows NT box. It, too, can handle TIF and EPS files, and has useful tools to monitor the status of the paper and its pages.
Like the other packages, templates for standard sections can be set up, eliminating some of steps. In its current incarnation it cannot import page layouts from products such as Layout/8000, requiring (like the others) that data already figured out by one system be rekeyed into another.
AII engineers say that issue is being addressed.
'Look at workflow'
Andy Grant, a marketing representative with Agfa Corp. of Ridgefield Park, N.J., said changing needs have given his company a strong push into a workflow production system, one in which imposition is a critical piece."Color, proofing and CTP are all drivers that get people to look again at the structure of their workflow," Grant said. "People have been buying [companies], consolidating plants, opening plants and adding color. All of this makes you look at how pages go together and it makes you look at workflow."
At the heart of the company's response is Intellinet, Grant said, a workflow product designed for newspapers from the bottom up. The system runs on a Windows NT workstation and, Grant said, is file independent, using Internet Protocol (IP) technology.
Richard Vitale, an Agfa engineer, said the system sits between the RIP and the imagesetter and can run in both managed RIP and unmanaged RIP modes.
"In managed RIP," Vitale said, "it will take PostScript and run it to the RIP and then bring it back and distribute it. In an unmanaged mode, we take TIFF and create a pairing and send to the output devices."
Agfa, too, uses templates for standard configurations.
"When you need to make up a paper, a customer would make a series of templates based on print sites and press configurations at print sites," Vitale said. "That way you always have them on hand and you don't have to recreate them."
Other features include the ability to identify pages, such as those with color, and raise their priority as they move through the system; the ability to control the number of items output, based on collect or straight press runs, and being able to flip the image if the press is being run without a blanket.
Vitale said that though the system could be placed almost anywhere, it made most sense to place it in the production planning department or simply near the person who creates the makeup of the newspaper.
DK&A is one of the leaders in imposition software, with its flagship INposition working from within Quark XPress. "It's basically an XTension," said Starr. "You take the Quark pages and go to an imposed plate."
XPress can handle two-up pairing, converting reader spreads to printer spreads, Starr said, but "if text changes, it's a nightmare."
"We originally started with giving it a folding order and how many pairs, and it pairs them for you," Starr said. "It doesn't affect the graphical document at all, and it cuts out a step."
Starr said that although designers needed to learn something new, it was worth the effort.
"The people who compose this are now comfortable with going ahead with composing plates," he said, but "they have to learn a little about what the pressman needs. The advantage is that this allows last-minute changes on the document."
DK&A has a stripped-down version that runs on Macintosh or Windows, although the full product runs only on a Mac. The full version includes features such as the ability to bring together multiple XPress documents that may have been split up by the editing or design process, allowing them to be properly paired and output.
"Printing is out of Quark and uses that same print dialog," Starr said. "We're just printing plates instead of pages.
"And this allows publishers to save time and save money," he said.
-- Steven E. Brier
Agfa Corp.,
(201) 440-0111,
e-mail: info@agfahome.com;
Autologic Information International Inc.,
(805) 498-9611,
e-mail: rmedina@autoiii.com;
DK&A Inc.,
(619) 488-8118,
e-mail: marketing@dka.com;
Dynagram Software,
(418) 694-2080,
e-mail: info@dynagram.com;
Monotype Systems Inc.,
(847) 427-8800,
e-mail: sales@monoexpress.com.From THE COLE PAPERS, July 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.
