US Newspaper's Workflow System Paves Way For CTP

Fusion Systems International has automated the pre-press department of the Sun Journal, a newspaper publisher in Lewiston, Maine (USA).

The work was undertaken to prepare the publisher for its move to CTP.

The publishing company prints its own daily newspaper (the Sun Journal), a Sunday section, as well as several weeklies and commercial print work.

Seeing the need to improve make-ready time, save on make-ready consumables and newsprint and also to improve colour quality, the Sun Journal decided to move to CTP.

The company plans to redirect production from its two Agfa 3850 filmsetters to a newly installed Kodak Creo Trendsetter CTP device this month.

Determined to move to CTP, the company realised late last year that it was time to improve its pre-press workflow, particularly by automating imposition.

It chose Fusion Systems International's workflow software products for their openness, flexibility and scalability, which would enable the Sun Journal to maiximise existing investments in hardware and software.

An automated imposition workflow was installed using Fusion Systems' Digipage ROOM workflow plug-in and FTIFF accelerator plug-in.

The Digipage workflow plug-in was installed in to a workflow system that includes Dynagram's Automate imposition software and a Harlequin-based Agfa RIP for Windows, which feeds one of the company's Agfa 3850 filmsetters.

The FTIFF plug-in speeds up TIFF generation by an order of two or three, added Fusion Systems.

Dynamic job routing (otherwise known as template based naming), true-page numbering and post-process scripting are main features of Fusion Systems' Workflow ESP that is built in to the Digipage and FTIFF plug-ins for automating pre-press tasks.

Once Digipage and Automate were configured and installed in the existing pre-press production workflow, the Sun Journal was able to distribute the various sections of its weeklies in to unique directories.

From there, the task of multi-section automation was straight forward, added Fusion Systems.

With multiple section output configured, one weekly was in production, printing, the same day.

The Sun Journal's David Costello, who is vice president of production and Spencer Fitz, the company's senior systems administrator, were key decision makers, evaluating and selecting Fusion Systems' workflow systems from amongs the options available on the market.

Before installing Digipage, the company would receive jobs for its weeklies via FTP, manually impose them in InDesign or Quark, pre-flight them and then print.

Now the workflow is configured to poll for the existence of the single-page jobs on an FTP input queue and, when detected, they are inducted automatically in to the workflow, RIPped, imposed and sent to the downstream imaging device.

What used to take over two hours on average per weekly title now takes a few minutes, said Fusion Systems.

Spencer Fitz explained he will save a lot of time when the Sun Journal fully automates production.

Changing the location to which RIPped jobs are directed - that is, changing the target output device from the Agfa 3850 imagesetter to the Kodak Trendsetter CTP device - will be simple and quick to effect.

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