Software - Workflow

Enfocus is to release Enfocus Instant PDF 10, a major upgrade to the company’s popular application for creating high quality, press-ready PDFs, in Q1 2012. The most frequently requested feature, annotated error reporting (or, easy problem identification), is the highlight of this major upgrade.  Instant PDF 10 will also offer new support for OSX 10.7 Lion, Adobe CS 5.5 Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat X/Distiller. Instant PDF 10 additionally utilises Enfocus PitStop Library 10, the latest version of the underlying technology supporting the entire PitStop line.

With immediate effect, users purchasing or upgrading to Instant PDF 09 now will be entitled to a free upgrade to Instant PDF 10, until the actual release date. For those using a version below Instant PDF 08 upgrades are only available until the release of Instant PDF 10.

Enfocus Instant PDF 10 makes production of press-ready PDFs easy for creative professionals. Using award-winning Enfocus Certified PDF technology, Instant PDF has become known around the world as the simplest and most reliable way to create PDFs that comply with print and advertisement specifications.

Customers ask for reporting with links to errors: requested and delivered

Enfocus Senior Product Manager, Andrew Bailes-Collins, credits an in-depth Instant PDF customer survey for giving the company critical information regarding market needs. “Instant PDF users have made it clear that they trust and rely on Enfocus’ error reporting, but don’t want to waste time searching for identified errors,” he says of the request for improved reporting. “They want to see the problem areas through an annotated report, so that the problems can be quickly resolved, allowing them to move on to the next job and save valuable time.”

PitStop Library 10 and support for major standards and popular applications

Building Instant PDF 10 on the latest PitStop Library means that operators enjoy the same level of error identification and correction as highest-end Enfocus application sites. Other Instant PDF developments have turned it into one of the most robust tools in a designer’s arsenal. These advancements include support for the latest Apple OS; the latest Adobe applications as well as Acrobat/Distiller; and previous updates including support for the latest PDF/X standards, preflight checks, colour engines, and integration with Enfocus’ Switch automation solution.  Together these combine to substantially elevate the capabilities of organisations using Instant PDF. 

In fact, the price of a single Instant PDF license often costs less that a single “make good” on a print job -- where the “make good” could have been avoided by using Instant PDF in the first place.

Survey returns high levels of satisfaction among instant PDF users

Analysis of the aforementioned customer survey, administered earlier this year, highlighted the fact that more than 90% of those participating believe Instant PDF is easy to use and easy to understand, and that 86% believe Instant PDF to be a “very good value for money”.

“You get Enfocus’ full preflight and error correction for a fraction of the cost,” says Bailes-Collins. “Users now can remedy problems faster, with reports linking precisely to identified areas. Survey respondents already like Instant PDF -- the release of Instant PDF 10 could increase their satisfaction, if that’s possible!”

 

Following its agreement with Enfocus to license the PitStop technology, ONYX Graphics has launched the SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-in for Adobe Acrobat.  Available in December, this plug-in gives wide-format shops the ability to optimise productivity by eliminating the time-consuming steps required to correct client-supplied PDF files that have colour, font or other problems that cause incorrect output.

“The new SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-in gives operators the ability to move to a dependable PDF workflow, regardless of the file source,” explains Danielle Mattiussi, Director of Product Marketing for ONYX Graphics. “SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-in is a wide format PDF preflighting solution that catches many specific trouble areas and problems and provides quick solutions, so print shops will no longer have to waste valuable prepress and production time managing this lack of predictability around issues such as transparencies, colour or other print related issues.”

Mattiussi says that design applications can create uncertainty in print production due to special effects such as drop shadows, spot colours and fonts. Client files that must be made print-ready by the print shop add time and cost to any given print job – time that can’t always be billed back to the client.

“This exciting collaboration between Enfocus and ONYX Graphics brings Enfocus’ market-leading technology to the wide and large-format graphics market segment, which is beginning to embrace PDF workflows,” says Alex Hamilton, Director of Business Development, Enfocus. “There are few, if any, manufacturers better positioned to bring PitStop’s renowned advantages – in use by over 100,000 organisations worldwide - to this market segment, than Onyx Graphics.”

Key features

The SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-in helps fix troublesome client PDF files quickly and efficiently without ever leaving Adobe Acrobat software. Key features include:

 

• only seconds until the PitStop Pro plug-in checks all aspects of wide format PDF files to create certified print consistency.
• a wide format-specific preflight checklist that creates a reliable “digital master” so PDF files print correctly, with the highest quality and optimal printing performance.
• automatic highlighting of spot color and color management issues; also provides quick options for correction.
• automatic detection of file issues such as missing or bad fonts, missing bleed and more.
• tools to quickly edit PDF files from inside Adobe Acrobat software, without damaging the integrity of the original file.
• Action Lists that enable automation of many tedious changes to multiple PDF files, such as color conversions and adding finishing marks.

The ONYX SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-in is the second in the new SmartApps toolset that cuts production time and costs by optimising workflow using existing design applications. Designed to help those who prepare files for wide format printing, SmartApps plug-ins are application specific, operating system independent, easy to use and affordably priced. They are complementary to any wide format RIP software – ONYX RIP software is not required to use the plug-ins.

Availability

The SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-In will be  available as a 30-day, full-version trial and for purchase by December 2011 through ONYX dealers worldwide. For more information, visit www.onyxgfx.com

Fujifilm has announced the commercial availability of its cloud-based web-to-print solution ‘XMF Print Centre’. Utilising its expertise in cloud-based printing from within its web-to-print photo business, which last year processed over 5 million orders, the company has tailored this solution for the print industry. It aims to help printers extend the print services they offer across both offset and digital production as more business moves online.

XMF Print Centre allows a print service provider to easily create single or multiple e-commerce portals tailored to the requirements of individual or multiple customers, and supports a wide variety of static and variable data printed products. The customisable web shop allows users to very simply adapt their web shop branding for a particular target market or client, and is suitable for all print business from commercial to wide format.

John Davies, business strategy manager, workflow, FUJIFILM Europe, comments: “We are confident that the commercial availability of our web-to-print solution brings end users the best of both worlds: our experience of hosted cloud-based systems from other areas of the Fujifilm business coupled with our established XMF workflow technologies.” He continues, “We have had a lot of interest in the product since we announced our intention to launch at the start of the summer, and are looking forward to fulfilling these implementations in the coming weeks. XMF Print Centre is very quick to set up and deploy, typically taking just a week.”

Rob Gutteridge, Technical Director at Gildenburgh in the UK, the first beta–testing site for XMF Print Centre adds, “After rigorously testing Fujifilm’s new XMF Print Centre over the last few months we are confident that this solution has huge potential and is a strong web-to-print contender. You only have to listen to the feedback we have been receiving from our customers, which is extremely positive.” He adds, “The solution has inherent flexibility, and the interface is particularly easy to use. We think it is an excellent product and has already helped us generate new business.”

As well as working with Fujifilm’s XMF Workflow, XMF Print Centre is also compatible will all other print production workflow systems on the market, allowing a printer to add XMF Print Centre easily to an existing workflow infrastructure.

Over the last few months, this new web-to-print solution has undergone stringent beta testing, and as a result several new features have been introduced. A lot of emphasis has been placed on the development of its user interface, ensuring that it is extremely straightforward to use. The print buyer experience includes a simple product selector, an interactive job editor with live job updates, and a familiar payment and delivery checkout system. The job editor features enhanced text editing and provides the ability to upload and pre-flight PDF files for printing. All online orders are then automatically routed to one or more print locations for printing and order fulfilment. Additional support for spot colours also allows for more corporate and professional work to be managed.

The back office of XMF Print Centre offers a set of very comprehensive tools for managing all aspects of the online print environment. The users can define their pricing models, set client specific discounts, create new products for sale and manage other criteria that might encourage future business - such as creating vouchers and issuing email newsletters.

“We believe that web-to-print systems will not replace the one-to-one relationship that printers develop with their clients for the more complex print jobs, but some of the simpler jobs will be more economical to manage via online methods. Web-to-print will most certainly have a place within all successful print service providers’ businesses," concludes John.

Four Pees, exclusive worldwide distributor of the PrintFactory software suite, will be exhibiting the recently released PrintFactory Go in addition to the rest of the PrintFactory product line at SGIA 2011, New Orleans, 19th to 21st October.

Four Pees will be present on the stand of its newly appointed partner, Color Management Group (booth #353).  It will be demonstrating the complete PrintFactory portfolio, including the new PrintFactory 4.2 which includes new features, fixes reported problems and also updates the earlier announced stand-alone version PrintFactory Go.

The PrintFactory product line

By introducing PrintFactory Go, Four Pees now offers a complete line of LFP products that caters for the needs of all types of LFP customers:

• PrintFactory Go offers stand-alone correction and production preparation for large format printing
• PrintFactory is the complete production suite for banner, sign and super wide format printing
• PrintFactory GMG Edition is the all-in-one solution for standardised Large Format production

PrintFactory Go: stand-alone correction and production preparation

PrintFactory Go offers the same job preparation and last minute correction tools the PrintFactory suite has to offer, in an easy-to-use stand-alone application. Whether you need to combine and correct multiple jobs, make edits on colour, masks, shapes, scaling, rotation, mirroring, create tiles or place grommets, PrintFactory Go puts all of the tools at your fingertips. Targeted specifically at digital large format print users, it offers a comprehensive collection of pre-production tools saving time and reducing error and waste.

PrintFactory: more than a RIP

PrintFactory is the most complete production solution for large format printing. It has all the tools needed to cover the entire LFP workflow from dedicated job preparation over colour management to printing and cutting. The product suite prints jobs as they are being processed, driving over 600 different printing, cutting and CTS devices. PrintFactory not only increases productivity and operator flexibility, it also allows to produce more efficiently. The advanced colour engine can easily introduce proofing in workflows, reducing waste of expensive production media and ink. With PrintFactory, a predictable and consistent output is generated and colour consistency can be achieved on different machines.

PrintFactory 4.2 features a streamlined output interface offering an even more productive print and cut workflow. By allowing to select printer, medium and output mode directly in the document window and launching the Driver Settings dialog. With version 4.2 it is now also possible to print multi-page documents on desktop printers.

In PrintFactory Editor, the Production Bar allows you to select the cutting device. And besides the option of printing multi-page documents on desktop printers, you can now also view a coloured wireframe display of cut layers and perform cutter tool selection per layer.

The new PrintFactory RIP makes it possible to create virtual queues for each cutter device so there’s no longer a need to manually create queues.

Version 4.2 also offers some major new features with regards to device and driver support.

PrintFactory GMG Edition

PrintFactory GMG Edition is the most complete production solution for large format printing. Through the integration of the GMG ColorServer colour management software and the GMG SmartProfiler profiling and calibration tool, PrintFactory GMG Edition not only increases productivity and operator flexibility, it provides consistent colours and highest production reliability. GMG ColorServer processes any kind of colour conversions fully automatically in order to obtain uniform colour standards. GMG SmartProfiler is the user-friendly solution for creating GMG ColorServer colour profiles and printer calibrations for Large Format Printing systems. Thus, GMG ColorServer and GMG SmartProfiler ensure cross-media consistency while maintaining the same colour and print quality.

For more information about the PrintFactory product-line, or to download a trial version please visit www.print-factory.net.

With the update to version 4.2, ProofMaster and PrintFactory are fully compatible with Mac OS 10.7 – Lion.

EskoArtwork has announced the latest addition to the i-cut Suite: i-cut Automate.  Built on Esko's highly successful Automation Engine, i-cut Automate ties the pieces of the i-cut Suite together and automates the entire production process, from design to print to cut. Users can build dynamic workflows that will automate repetitive prepress tasks, thereby enhancing productivity, reducing operator intervention and errors and saving valuable time, money and materials in the production process.

“Sign and display graphics producers are constantly looking for ways to run more efficiently so that they can meet their customers’ needs,” explains Isabelle Noppe, EskoArtwork Product Manager i-cut Suite. “Automating their prepress workflow with i-cut Automate will enable them to handle greater volumes of work more economically, and to shorten their cycle times. In turn, this will lead to greater profitability.”

Major addition to an advanced suite of tools

i-cut Automate is an addition to the i-cut Suite, part of the EskoArtwork Suite 10 – a set of integrated software tools for the packaging, printing and sign & display industry. i-cut Suite also includes i-cut Preflight, i-cut Layout and i-cut Vision Pro - tools.The i-cut Suite has been launched in 2010 and since then has seen rapid growing popularity at large format printing plants allover the world.  

i-cut Preflight handles efficient preflighting and editing of incoming PDF files, ensuring that jobs will RIP and print correctly.

i-cut Layout is a module for interactively building and editing sheet layouts, ensuring that jobs are set up to make the optimum use of the substrate through intelligent true shape nesting and tiling. It also enables file preparation for printing, through adding grommet marks, and creating cut paths and bleeds.

With i-cut Automate, all of these functions are now possible in a single automated workflow, with less operator intervention required and fewer potential manual errors. Through Mac or PC based clients, operators can easily monitor the workflow and interact when necessary through a comprehensive checkpoint.

Repetitive tasks can be made far less time-consuming through setting up dynamic workflows that are easy to operate in a client-server environment. i-cut Automate can also be integrated with Management Information Systems, enabling automatic job creation and the submission of job parameters to the workflow via XML data.

Positive customer feedback

i-cut Automate is already being used by customers the world over to reap significant efficiency benefits. For instance, the professional photo laboratory APLUS, in Nanterre ,Paris, uses it to satisfy the exacting requirements of its discerning customers, including professional photographers, portrait photographers and even websites specialising in imagery. Arnaud Le Nedelec, technical manager of the APLUS laboratory, explains, “In terms of printing on rigid materials (Plexiglas, Dibond aluminium, PVC, etc.) for high-end displays, i-cut Automate allows us to manage our web-to-print process in a completely automated workflow, from the acceptance of the order to the printing/cutting stage. Our customers’ files are supported right from the order, grouped together by type of material, printed and cut out. In this workflow, the only manual intervention required is to position the sheets on the printing and cutting table. This saves precious time, which allows us to be more available for our customers. It also saves material because the sheets are perfectly optimised.”

Availability

i-cut Automate will be officially launched at the SGIA Expo wide format tradeshow in New Orleans, USA from October 19-21, 2011, and will be released to customers in the weeks following the show: http://www.sgia.org/events/current_expo/sgia11/.
As a scalable solution, the pricing of i-cut Automate depends upon the number of clients who will interact with the system, and on the required productivity.

Enfocus adds support for the recently released Mac OS (X 10.7) Lion operating system to PitStop Pro and PitStop Server. In addition, Version 10 Update 3 of both PitStop Pro and PitStop Server includes new channel remapping capabilities and more power, control and flexibility with respect to colour conversion. 
 
Leen Vanmaele, Product Manager, at Enfocus, comments, “Printing firms are still receiving PDF documents that contain unwanted or incorrect spot colour separations.  With the new Channel Remap functionality included in Update 3 of PitStop Pro 10 and PitStop Server 10, unwanted spot colour separations can easily and accurately be replaced with another spot colour or with a specific CMYK colour. This is important for increasingly time-sensitive workflows, minimising the potential for expensive errors in the printed job.”

Vanmaele points out that Channel Remap allows users to easily replace an unwanted spot colour with the correct spot colour, remove a spot colour channel altogether, convert a CMYK colour to a spot colour, or convert a spot colour to CMYK as appropriate.

In PitStop Pro 10 Update 3, Remap Channels can be accessed through Remap Colors within the Global Changes menu and are also accessible from within Action Lists meaning that the functionality can also be used in PitStop Server. In addition, the PitStop Pro Inspector panel contains interactive Channel Remap functionality within the Separations section.

“Making this important capability available from a variety of menu hierarchies as well as through Action Lists helps streamline complex prepress workflows,” adds Vanmaele.

PitStop 10 Update 3 adds extra functionality to the “Snap to Color” Action List, allowing users to replace a specific CMYK colour with a spot colour, or vice versa, while honouring original density specifications. For example, orange in CMYK can be replaced with a spot colour ‘orange’, keeping the visual representation accurate to the original designer intent.

Availability

PitStop Pro 10 update 3 and PitStop Server 10 update 3 can by downloaded as free updates for all existing PitStop 10 users from www.enfocus.com.