July 2003 Issue
2003 TLMI Products and Services Guide
The 14th annual edition of the Tag and Label Manufacturers Institute (TLMI) Products and Services Guide offers a compilation of TLMI converter and supplier member contact information and product and service profiles. Use the listings to locate companies and key personnel geographically, via phone or on-line. Or, consult the product charts to reference member capabilities at a glance. Product charts are available as Adobe PDF files and require Acrobat Reader. TLMI Converter Members Tag Converter Products: Primary Markets/Industrial/Printing Processes | Tag Converter Products: In-House Capabilities/Materials Tag Converter Products: Final Products/Other Construction/Approvals Label Converter Products: Primary Markets/Industrial (A-FLE) | Label Converter Products: Printing Processes/In-House Capabilities
Cover Story-The Complete Package
VersaPack is prepared to offer North America more retort capabilities. RETORT POUCHES ARE used prevalently throughout Europe and Asia. However, in the United States—the birthplace of the thermostabilized, laminated pouch—the packaging has been slow to make it from Meals Ready to Eat produced for the U.S. Armed Forces to American store shelves. That won't last for long; not if VersaPack, the sales and marketing arm of a Korean film converter, has anything to say about it. VersaPack started producing retort pouches more than 10 years ago. Since then, the Fair Lawn, N.J. company has taken considerable steps to ensure the stateside future of the
PDF Update
As Adobe celebrates 10 years of Acrobat, pP takes a look at how PDF is used in packaging. TEN YEARS AGO on June 16, Adobe Systems launched the first commercial release of Acrobat, and with it delivered the Portable Document Format (PDF). For years before, the company had used the program internally for mundane things like annotating memos and printing corporate phonebooks. Today, you can't be in the graphic communications business without touching something PDF every day. Just how did this software—originally designed as an office tool—become so ubiquitous in the graphic arts industry? You might call it a brand loyalty thing. Because, according
The Science of Doctor Blades
A review of the top issues concerning doctor blades. THE ARTISTRY OF doctoring the doctor blade is giving way to science. Tom Allison, president of Allison Systems (Riverside, N.J.), remembers when he used to ask his dad what the press operators were doing as he watched them prepare the doctor blade for printing. After hushing his son, Allison's father would say, "Pressmen are frustrated artists; each one has his own 'pallet' of special things he feels that he alone can do to make 'great art' come off the press." Where once true—when the performance of the doctor blade depended solely upon the operator's set-up—now
