New Workflow Transforms Newspaper's Pre-Press

The Daily Breeze, a Copley Press owned newspaper in the USA, has completed the conversion of its pre-press production to a Fusion Systems' OS X-based raster management workflow system.

The Daily Breeze, a Copley Press owned newspaper in the USA, has completed the conversion of its pre-press production to a Fusion Systems' OS X-based raster management workflow system and is seeing immediate returns on its investment.

The new pre-press system includes Fusion Systems' Digipage ROOM workflow plug-in technology that is now available for all Harlequin RIPs running on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Digipage provides digital integrity proofing without the need for third-party software or additional hardware.

Digipage also automatically fixes a wide range of common production problems in a completely automated fashion, said Fusion Systems.

In addition to The Daily Breeze publication, which covers Los Angeles coastal community news and events, the Torrance, Califronia-based production facility also manages pre-press production for several other regional coastal publications.

The decision to invest in new Fusion OS X RIPs with Digipage and FTIFF workflow plug-ins to replace older, out-dated RIP technology has provided highly measurable returns, claimed Fusion.

The workflow's built-in capabilities for direct file printing, job-name cleansing, advanced true-page numbering, automated file routing and soft-proofing have reduced production time requirements and wasteful proofing materials usage.

In April 2005 the paper moved print production to Southwest Offset Printing in nearby Gardena, a decision that allowed The Daily Breeze to concentrate on creation, editorial, advertising and pre-press.

Pages are sent to Southwest Offset for pairing, plating and printing on newer high-speed Heidelberg Mercury presses.

Prior to that change The Daily Breeze ran three AIII RIPs to drive three AIII3850 film-setters and all products were printed internally on its Goss press.

Changing to an outside print facility required several changes in the pre-press production process, said Fusion Systems.

The Daily Breeze, which is built using a DTI News Speed System, would have to be RIPed to one-bit TIFF separations that could be transferred to the remote printing facility.

The weeklies and special inserts, which are all produced in Quark XPress, would be distilled to PDF and then transferred.

Whilst the changes sound minor they immediately introduced new challenges and occasionally resulted in late file submissions, complicated and time consuming correction cycles, wasteful proofing practices, and production bottlenecks due to various technology limitations.

The Daily Breeze continued to utilise its older DEC Alpha RIPs to convert Postscript from the DTI Speed Driver, which links back to a DTI database and pagination engine, to one-bit TIFF separations.

The RIPs worked but were slow, out of date, hosted on unsupported hardware and operating systems, and were becoming incompatible with evolving Postscript and PDF standards.

Production of weekly editions, typically created on older workstation hardware and older versions of Quark XPress, now required page layouts to be individually distilled, or saved out as Postscript pages, each correctly named and numbered.

With a weekly count upwards of 300 pages the process of making corrections and re-distilling pages stretched production past midnight, added the company.

That, in turn, delayed submission of all pages to the remote printing facility.

Something needed to be done to simplify pre-press processes and shorten the total production cycle.

In addition to intermediate proofing during the regular production cycle the transition to an outside printer also necessitated the generation of hard copy proofs at The Daily Breeze and at Southwest Offset.

That was done to facilitate communications, and for overall quality control.

It contributed time and material waste and because the proofs lacked digital integrity to the data used to make plate separations, it offered limited value towards overall quality control, added Fusion Systems.

Jim Bush, the network and production systems supervisor at The Daily Breeze, had read about Fusion Systems and decided to contact the company regarding its OS X RIPs and digital integrity workflow systems.

Following a Webex demonstration and initial testing The Daily Breeze purchased three Fusion OS X RIPs, each with the Digipage ROOM workflow plug-in, FTIFF one-bit TIFF accelerator plug-ins, and Firstproof soft proofing application.

The system was integrated to the specific workflow requirements to simplify and accelerate production.

Immediately, time requirements for getting out The Daily Breeze shrunk due to the high-speed processing capabilities of the new RIPs.

Hot-folders routines allowed for automatic processing of DTI generated PDF files.

All one-bit TIFF separations are now held and visually inspected prior to being transmitted to the printing plant.

The hard proofing requirements, both at the newspaper and the printer's location were eliminated, saving production time and eliminating consumable waste.

The impact for production of weeklies has been even more dramatic, according to Fusion Systems.

All Quark page layouts, are now printed directly to printer queues, which eliminates the need to convert pages to PDF altogether and last minute fixes and changes are accomplished.

Creating PDFs of the Quark pages used to take 12 hours on production days to distill the pages and quality assure them.

The new Fusion RIPs automatically handle jump pages and sectioning, and routing of output correctly, added Fusion.

At any time a classified or display advertisement layout operator can print a single page or series of pages to a published proofing queue and automatically generate a Fusion raster-PDF that shows exactly how the job will print because the PDF is created from high resolution one-bit TIFF separations data.

Hard copy proofing is minimised and errors on the final layout can be completely eliminated.

Production time for weeklies has been reduced by 12 hours per week.

The processing of jobs supplied to The Daily Breeze from outside customers has been streamlined as well.

Built-in file name sanitising has completely automated the task of fixing obscured PDF file names.

For instance, one externally produced weekly used to take as much as five hours to manually fix before it could be sent out for printing.

With the Fusion RIPs now in place this task is handled automatically, within a few minutes, in the background, added the company.

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