DigiPage 4.0 Offers Greater Flexibility

Fusion Systems International, a leading independent developer of Mac OS X and UNIX-based prepress workflow solutions, has announced the release of DigiPage 4.0 for Harlequin RIPs.

Fusion Systems International, a leading independent developer of Mac OS X and UNIX-based prepress workflow solutions, has announced the release of DigiPage 4.0 for Harlequin RIPs.

Currently available for Mac OS X and Redhat ES Linux, a Windows version of the Harlequin RIP Plug-in will also be available in the fourth quarter of 2005.

The DigiPage Room Workflow Plug-in is based on industry-standard file formats, which leverages the high performance of the Harlequin Eclipse and Genesis RIP technology.

Through a single print command jobs can be processed on a page-by-page basis into DigiPage files for post-RIP imposition and 'Dot-Locked' ink-jet proofing, using any application of choice.

DigiPage is a multi-platform Room Workflow Plug-in that can be added as an option to Harlequins RIPs from a broad range of OEMs such as AB Dick, Compose, ECRM, Esko-Graphics, Mitsubishi, Presstek, Screen, Xitron and others.

An operator can do imposition once and then output a digital composite color proof that is 'Dot-Locked' because the proofing files are generated from the 1-bit TIFF separations data that is ultimately used to generate the final printing plates.

Once the correction cycle is completed the imposed DigiPage files are then sent as separation to any film or computer-to-plate imaging device.

The DigiPage Room Workflow plug-in supports up to 16 color separations, and automatically folds all spot colours into a known CMYK colour space for colour accurate reproduction on industry standard ink-jet proofers.

When generating the CMYK colour composite proofing files the DigiPage Plug-in automatically cross-references an extensive library of Pantone look-up tables to reproduce spot colours accurately.

Additional enhancements have been made to the scriptable back-end to the DigiPage plug-in.

Clients now have an elegant means for linking custom scripts to the RIP workflow, using any scripting language, that provide additional automation and production cost savings.

These scripting improvements allow for specific customer needs to be created faster and more easily.

For example, each page could be automatically and dynamically registered into a database, along with thumbnails and page statistics, including resolution and line screen.

This could give production managers crucial real-time feedback about jobs in progress.

Another example of script-actions that can be applied to DigiPage output files is to allows for copy of the composite CMYK proofing image to be saved to a separate directory a TIFF file.

This allows for a wide range of soft-proofing and hard-proofing options.

For instance, this separate composite TIFF file (down sampled from the hi-res separations) could be automatically converted to PDF, using open source, or commercial utilities.

These resulting PDF files could be saved to a digital asset management server such as Xinet WebNative (or others) to make 'Dot-Locked' proofing files available for remote users to view over the internet, and/or download for remote proofing.

Or these 'Dot-Locked' PDF files could be automatically emailed to a CSR, or a customer, for viewing and approval, etc.

A data sheet outlining the functionality of the Fusion DigiPage Room Workflow Plug-in can be downloaded from the Fusion Systems website.

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