Improved Proteus Sets Spec's For Ads And Editorial

EFI is now shipping an enhanced version of Proteus with new features that are said to more closely integrate planning and production.

EFI is now shipping an enhanced version of Proteus with new features that are said to more closely integrate planning and production.

Proteus is a software system that provides publishing professionals the ability to plan, position, view and set printing press specifications for all advertising and editorial elements of a magazine, newspaper, catalogue or other publication, said EFI.

The most significant improvement in Proteus version 4.7 is the ability to export to Adobe Indesign on Macintosh OS X and Windows 2000 and XP.

Building a new bridge from content management to content design, Proteus now exports page geometry to Adobe's Indesign CS.

The user controls the output by selecting the pages to be exported and then Proteus does the rest.

Attached images, text files and multiple boxes in a single editorial item will be automatically linked in Indesign, saving valuable time for the designer, said EFI.

Another major change is the ability for PC users to display digital content in the page layouts and for both PC and Mac users to display PDF images.

United Litho, a magazine printer based in Ashburn, Virginia (USA) has been serving short-run to medium-run association and special-interest publishers for 30 years and is a member of The Sheridan Group.

Said Rebecca Hoeckele, EFI's Proteus liaison and trainer: "A very exciting enhancement to version 4.7 is the ability to attach PDF images to the dummy and have those images appear automatically in Indesign when the page geometry is exported.

Given today's PDF-based workflows, the PDF integration is a real time-saver that our users will love.

The new, customisable fields for tracking sales status and production status are another welcome addition, especially for customers who aren't using a sophisticated ad tracking system.

Those fields give them a way to consolidate this information and produce a variety of different reports." Marc Olin, the vice president and general manager for EFI Commercial Print Systems, said: "This latest Proteus release has truly raised the bar on functions and integration of features, which is critical to meet the changing needs of our publishing customers.

More than ever, Proteus streamlines the complicated process of publication planning and management, allowing our customers to focus on providing excellent service to their customers." Proteus is claimed to allow editors, art directors, sales managers, production managers, printers and other publishing professionals to collaborate on the assembly and production of a publication.

The end result is a digital 'map' of an issue, containing the exact pagination, colour reproduction, imposition and other information the printer needs to produce the issue accurately and efficiently.

Proteus is available with four levels of functions for both the PC and Mac platforms.

Other features of the system include an icon-driven interface, drop-and-drag functions throughout and automatic conflict-checking.

Proteus is claimed to support an unlimited number of inserts, bind-ins and blow-ins of any dimension and it is said to refolio and alpha-paginate on-the-fly, whilst automatically generating press paperwork and calculating and displaying advertisement and editorial ratio in real-time and calculating costing elements based on a pre-defined printer's contract.

The system is also said to manage regional or demographic editions or mixtures, including remnant tracking.

EFI recently integrated Proteus with its newly enhanced EFI Prograph module, which is said to allow the completed publication layout and data to be electronically delivered to the printer's EFI Hagen management system.

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