Packaging Workflow Takes Wing
Stephen Miller, CreoScitex package printing applications specialist, reveals how 2001 may be a banner prepress year.
by Terri McConnell, Prepress Editor
This month CreoScitex is set to launch one of the most ambitious packaging prepress systems based on the PDF file format. On the eve of lift-off, we asked Stephen Miller, one of Prinergy Powerpack's senior astronauts, to give us his perspective on where this new technology will take us.
pP: You've been in the industry during our most important technological growth period. What events have had the greatest impact on packaging productivity?
SM: Well, it all began with inexpensive desktop systems. The price tag and user-friendliness of Mac workstations gave more people access, and that really accelerated our conversion to digital production. Along with that came the availability of all-inclusive packaging assembly systems with trapping and step-and-repeat.
Next, we saw wider format plotters, so we didn't have to output small pieces of film and put them together on the table. Then there was the coming of telecommunications solutions for moving files back and forth across the country—and across the globe—very quickly. And finally, computer-to-plate technology seems to be the most important opportunity we have right now.
pP: How do you see CTP evolving in the packaging industry?
SM: I think we can expect to see CTP being used the way it is often used in the commercial printing world. Trade shops will create one-up digital files and transmit them to printers and converters with digital platemakers located in their plants, close to the presses.
In order for that to happen, we have to break our reliance on film as a "secure medium" for transferring jobs from the trade shops to the printer. That's a very important issue, because it involves accountability. The person who creates the pixels on film, or on plates in the case of CTP, is essentially the person responsible for making sure the content is correct.
Right now, the printer getting a one-up film or a plate can assume that the content has been approved by the legal, marketing, and engineering people of the consumer product company. It's locked down. All he has to do is step the job on a Misomex or otherwise prepare it for his specific manufacturing process.
To migrate to a press-side CTP model, we have to ensure that the printer can receive a digital file that has as much integrity as a piece of film. That's the basis behind the Prinergy Powerpack system and the work we're doing with PDF. The environment we're developing enables the trade shop to remotely prepare a one-up PDF file that can be saved with trapping, color management, step-and-repeat geometry, etc.
He can save the file with permissions before it's transmitted to the converter, so that it can be viewed but not altered. The converter brings up a plate layout template on his system, drags-and-drops a thumbnail of the one-up file into the template, and exposes a plate. This model gives us the ability to have a JIT digital plate system on location at the printer—who has the flexibility of changing layouts according to his scheduling demands—while still having that "locked down" file that maintains present lines of accountability.
pP: Why couldn't we do this with PostScript?
SM: Because PostScript is a page description language that fundamentally is based on a particular output device. PDF has given us a device-independent space, wherein we can see all the job elements before they are rendered to device specifications.
pP: There's as much skepticism out there now about PDF as there was in the early days of PostScript. Where is PDF not a good solution?
SM: At CreoScitex we have an answer for those skeptics: "The problem is not in the PDF file format, it's in the tools that we have available to work with the files." PDF is the strongest framework our industry has for a standard format. It's up to the application developers to build the right tools. We see that happening very quickly, not just with color, but with trapping, step-and-repeat, and all the other production requirements.
One of the misconceptions with PDF is that you can only have four colors with a continuous tone image. That's not true; the PDF spec provides for up to eight channels. The plan for Powerpack is to support all eight of those channels.
Also, a PDF standard facilitates the emergence of inexpensive, easy to use plug-ins and applets that add value. It gives us a much more open-ended digital universe. We don't have to make "all or nothing" decisions about what tools to use anymore. Everything is open and adaptable. Tools will constantly emerge that will make us even more productive.
As we move into Beta, we'll undoubtedly uncover some new limitations. But I don't anticipate a large percentage that can't be run through. We're focusing on job management, which we believe brings more than enough benefit to justify working with the PDF tools available right now.
pP: Talk a little about those job management tools. How will they improve the prepress process?
SM: In today's trade shops we see little islands of individual workflows that were built and then replaced as technology got better and better. We have operators at PCC stations, and ArtPro seats working independently from operators across the cubicle wall in a Barco department. The only links between them as far as shop management are the poor schedulers who run around all day with their clipboards asking, "How are you doing? Where's this job?"
The Prinergy Powerpack server is a common place for files to come and go so that people in the shop can watch and manage the work in progress. It's also a collaborative environment. For example, if we had a really hot job, I could start planning the step-and-repeat geometry, while you were trapping the one-up file. The heart of all of this visibility is the powerful Oracle database in Powerpack. It's based on the same Prinergy infrastructure that we already have in hundreds of installations worldwide.
It works like this. Powerpack has a Process Plan component for specifying a chain of production events for a particular job. Plans allow for more consistency and they can enable less skilled operators to participate. Customer service reps, for example, could use a process plan to pull a proof without the assistance of a workstation operator.
Within PDF there is portable job ticket (PJT) for recording a subset of information about the job. When you create a process plan, relevant data from the plan is automatically entered into the corresponding fields of the PJT. So when I assign a color management value to a 485 Red, or when I enter a trapping value of ten thousandths of an inch, those values are stored within the file. And the entire history of the job is recorded into the Oracle database, so that when it's time to edit and rerun a job, the prepress manager has access to all the functions that were ever performed. This data can be used to pull custom reports to help with billing cycles.
Finally, Powerpack incorporates Web tools, so that jobs can be uploaded, downloaded, and reviewed for online approval both internally and externally. This significantly speeds up the approval process and the cycle time on packaging jobs. It also empowers us to use tools that make communications around a job truly global—just like the packaging buyers are.
pP: Where are we going next in packaging prepress?
SM: I think Web-enabled workflows are the next step. Once people realize how easy it is, and how much value it adds, we'll see Internet use grow very quickly. For example, if you came on to my server and approved a design, I could be notified within seconds on my Web phone. This could put us hours ahead in production versus using traditional communications.
To exploit the Web, though, we need to realize that the changes are not just in our industry, but everywhere—whether it's a mechanic buying parts at a B2B site, or a sales rep filling out his expense report online. Once you look at it from that perspective, you can analyze your company's infrastructure and plan your preparedness for online workflows.
