We can often hear such comments: “The profit of prepress production is getting lower and lower!†This is due to the vicious price competition in the industry; on the other hand, it is due to the improvement of technology and continuous improvement of hardware and software equipment production capacity. , resulting in a continuous decline in the profit of single-page production. In this way, in the past few years, it was still a job with high technological content and high profits. Now it has become a job that must rely on scale operations and perfect operational procedures to be effective. This paper is prepared to discuss the bottlenecks that may arise in the prepress digital workflow in terms of performance and quality control, with a view to helping improve prepress production.
1 Bottlenecks in production performance
Prepress production operations are gradually becoming socialized. In addition to professional output centers and printing plants equipped with roller scanners and laser imagesetters (or even plate output machines), there have been advertisement companies, publishing houses, and graphic designers who are mainly responsible for creative design and production. Non-professional units such as production studios and text publishing services are engaged in front-end production or layout of pages.
The common feature of these non-professional units is that they have less investment in hardware and software equipment, as long as there are a few Macs or PCs, configure the corresponding graphics, graphics and grouping software, plus MO, external hard disk, platform scanner, Postscript laser The printer and simple network environment can work. If there is a man-made color separation input or the film is to be output last, the output center or the printing plant equipment is used. This environment greatly facilitates creativity and designers and can better use their creative talents. With the continuous improvement of the processing capabilities of computers and peripherals and the continuous reduction in prices, bottlenecks such as processing speed and storage capacity in such working environments have gradually disappeared. However, due to the following reasons, there may be bottlenecks in the prepress digital workflow. There are mainly three aspects:
(1) Do not have high-end input devices. During the design or layout of pages, the platform scanner is often used to input the originals at a lower resolution for image trimming and to determine the position of the layout. After all the design and layout work is completed, it is only at the professional output center or printing factory that the high-grade roller scanner scans the original image at a higher resolution to output the film or plate that can be used for printing. Call this process "drop map." During the mapping process, the scanning and imposition of the images have to be redone again, often resulting in new errors, thereby reducing the overall efficiency of prepress production. This bottleneck arises mainly due to the small dynamic density range of the scanner and the low optical resolution, while the price of high-end professional scanners will not be reduced to a level acceptable to designers, so the problem is difficult to solve. . At present, some manufacturers have introduced platform scanners with larger dynamic density range, higher optical resolution, and price acceptable to designers, such as AGFA's DuoScan series and Linoty Pe-Hell's Saifei series, which have a nominal dynamic density. Range up to 3. O or 3.4, with a maximum optical resolution of more than 2000ppi. Although this type of scanner can be used to scan most draft documents and partially neutral highlights, such scanners are generally not used for demanding jobs.
(2) It does not have high-speed remote transmission means. When the electronic version of the design group version is sent to a professional output center or a printing plant, MO or an external hard disk are generally used. This transmission method is not too big for the two districts in the same city, but it also creates a bottleneck problem that affects the pre-press production efficiency for offsite delivery. This type of delivery may be performed multiple times due to revisions and other reasons. At present, professional output centers or printing plants have used special lines or microwave communications to transfer electronic documents to important customers with large print volumes. For example, there are printers in the United States that use T1 lines (up to 2000 MB/h) to connect with remote customers. The corresponding E1 line in China, but the use of the price is too high. With the rapid development of the telecommunications industry and the ever-increasing demand for prepress operations, it is believed that more and more professional output centers and printing plants will use high-speed dedicated line communications.
(3) The quality of employees is not suitable. For now, the greater impact on prepress production efficiency should be said to be that the professional quality of employees is not suitable. This phenomenon can often be seen: When a finished document is sent to a professional output center for output, it also causes waste due to various reasons, which prolongs the production cycle and wastes manpower and material resources. Arrangements and designers are not familiar with the printing process is the main reason leading to errors. The settings of the overprinting (or penetration), the setting of bleeding and bleeding, the setting of trapping, and the setting of the spot color version are often incorrect. Some errors are not easily detected on the film. It can be found after proofing. What's more, problems like bleeding settings that are not detected in a timely manner can cause malfunctions in the binding jobs after printing. Severe problems can lead to product obsolescence. After the CTP is applied, the film will no longer be used, and it will be more difficult to find the above-mentioned errors, resulting in greater time and material waste. In addition, with the rapid development of prepress technology, practitioners must update their knowledge in a timely manner and absorb new technologies in a timely manner so that the effect of design creativity can be improved and the efficiency of work can be improved.
In professional output centers or printing plants, there are the following aspects that are worth noting:
(1) Network environment. Due to the large number of high-resolution images to be scanned, the amount of data processed can be large. How to make data flow between scanning workstations, revision workstations, imposition workstations, servers, printers, RIPs, etc. quickly and efficiently. Carefully designing processes and maintaining a smooth production line will ensure the productivity of these professional units. For this reason, a fast network environment is necessary. An A4 format uncompressed CMYK image that satisfies printing needs about 1 OOs of data to be transmitted on a 1OMb/S network. The prepress center may have two or more scanners, scanning an average of 100 images per class. It takes about 3 hours to transfer these images from the scanning workstation to the server. Other operations, such as retouching or imposition, must also save images to or from the server, which obviously takes longer. Some units now use hot-pluggable, removable hard drives to “plug†scanned image data directly into a server or retouching workstation to solve the problem of slow network transmission. The 1OOMb/S network (Ethernet) that has been rapidly promoted in the last two years is about 5 to 6 times faster than the 1OMb/S network. Moreover, the investment needed to upgrade to a 10OMb/S network has been greatly reduced. In order to save investment, it is also possible to ensure that computers with large amounts of data transmission, such as scanning workstations, servers, revision workstations, RIPs, and imposition workstations, have 1 OOMb/s bandwidth. At present, the 100OMb/S Ethernet has just begun to enter the market and the price is still too high.
(2) Optimize data transmission by using a reasonable working method and file format. With a fast network environment, there is still a need to optimize the transmission of data over the Internet. To this end, the prepress field has established two related specifications: the OPI (Open Prepress Interface) specification and the DCS (Desktop Color Separation) specification. The OPI specification contains a series of comment statements that conform to Postscript. It allows low-resolution proxy images to be used for imposition, and the color separation output is automatically replaced by the OPI server to the corresponding high-resolution image. Both the desktop prepress system and the non-desktop prepress system can apply the OPI specification, thereby minimizing the pressure on network transmission and storage requirements. The DCS specification is an extension of the Encapsulated PostScript format. It can manage the entire color separation process of the desktop publishing system, which helps to shorten production time and reduce equipment requirements. The DCS specification includes a main EPS file and a plurality of high-resolution color separation files (DCS 1.O), and the main EPS file stores annotations for file names and paths of the respective color separation files. DCS 2. O only uses one file to contain all separation files. You can place, crop, and scale DCS files in imposition software. Since only the main EPS file is placed into the imposition software, the displayed low-resolution image is displayed at this time, which is favorable for improving the imposition efficiency. When you need to output a document containing a DCS file, imposition software locates and outputs a high-resolution separation file. Although both specifications can optimize the transmission of data, there is one important difference: When a document containing a DCS file is output in color separation, the generated PS file contains a high-resolution color separation file; the PS output in OPI mode The file does not include a high-resolution color separation file. It only contains OPI annotations. The OPI server replaces the OPI annotation with a high-resolution color separation file and sends it to a laser imagesetter or a PS printer. Therefore, OPI mode can greatly reduce the amount of network transmission and save output time. However, to achieve DCS can not use a dedicated server, and OPI must be achieved through a dedicated OPI server software.
Take Helios OPI software Ethershare as an example. It runs on a UNIX system and provides support for AppleTalk protocol and TCP/IP protocol. On this basis, Ethershare OPI software provides OPI services for PC or Mac imposition workstations. When separate image files (such as TIFF, EPSF, etc.) are stored in the OPI server, the OPI server will generate a corresponding file *.lay for typesetting in the corresponding folder. *.lay is actually an EPS file. Place *.lay in the imposition software. When outputting, the print-generated PS file is transferred to the print queue of the OPI server. When the print queue is sent to the output device, the OPI software checks the contents of the PS file and finds where there is an OPI comment, and inserts the corresponding high-resolution image there to achieve high-resolution output of the image.
After entering the CTP era, the film is no longer used. Instead, the customer's template files, files generated through CopyDot processing, and PDF files are printed in the computer, and the plate is directly output by the platesetter. Therefore, the documents are The requirements for effective management and data flow will be higher.
(3) Make full use of equipment resources such as PCs. With the socialization of prepress production operations and the proliferation of personal computers, it will be more and more common for documents made with PCs to be sent to professional prepress centers. Professional prepress output center environment is often based on the Mac machine, color separation, retouching, drop maps are generally completed by the Mac machine, RIP is mostly run on the Mac machine. In order to integrate the PC files sent by customers into their work environment, professional output centers often have to spend a lot of manpower to solve problems such as text movement caused by font replacement. In fact, as long as the appropriate software is configured on the PC, it can be used together with the Mac to "combat" and make full use of the PC's equipment resources. You can use PCs such as Windows NT or PC MacLan to network the PC with AppleTalk-protocol servers or Macs, and accept image files that have been scanned with a scanner and retouched via a Mac, and then output to a laser imagesetter or Spool via the Internet. . The process of prepressing with a PC is similar to that of the Mac. Today, PCs have high performance-to-price ratios and are flexible in configuration. If they can maximize their role, they will be both convenient and economical for customers. Of course, in various environments with different configurations, in order for the PC to integrate smoothly, technical personnel are required to make an attempt to find the most suitable method.
(4) Use a Chinese character library. Chinese fonts have always been a bottleneck in the desktop publishing system in China. In the past, there were few types of fonts and they were expensive. The current Chinese fonts are rich, forming a situation where ordinary users are mainly based on TrueType, and professional prepress centers have both TrueTyPe and Postscript fonts. It seems that the bottleneck problem caused by Chinese fonts seems to have gradually disappeared, but it is not. When you open a recently published book or magazine, you can often see the adhesion of Chinese characters and punctuation marks, the adhesion of English letters, or the mismatch between the fonts of the digital or English letters in the text and the Chinese character fonts. Some of these problems are caused by the lack of fonts themselves, and others are due to the lack of thoughtful consideration of some special provisions of typesetting software for Chinese typesetting. There is a problem with the text typesetting and the film needs to be re-exported, which will result in waste of man-hours and materials. If sloppy, it will seriously affect the aesthetics and reading effect of printed products. Therefore, this can only be explored in the process of using the manual method to adjust the output film. Because the adjustment process is very time-consuming, it will seriously affect the production efficiency and output. In software providers and font makers themselves
1 Bottlenecks in production performance
Prepress production operations are gradually becoming socialized. In addition to professional output centers and printing plants equipped with roller scanners and laser imagesetters (or even plate output machines), there have been advertisement companies, publishing houses, and graphic designers who are mainly responsible for creative design and production. Non-professional units such as production studios and text publishing services are engaged in front-end production or layout of pages.
The common feature of these non-professional units is that they have less investment in hardware and software equipment, as long as there are a few Macs or PCs, configure the corresponding graphics, graphics and grouping software, plus MO, external hard disk, platform scanner, Postscript laser The printer and simple network environment can work. If there is a man-made color separation input or the film is to be output last, the output center or the printing plant equipment is used. This environment greatly facilitates creativity and designers and can better use their creative talents. With the continuous improvement of the processing capabilities of computers and peripherals and the continuous reduction in prices, bottlenecks such as processing speed and storage capacity in such working environments have gradually disappeared. However, due to the following reasons, there may be bottlenecks in the prepress digital workflow. There are mainly three aspects:
(1) Do not have high-end input devices. During the design or layout of pages, the platform scanner is often used to input the originals at a lower resolution for image trimming and to determine the position of the layout. After all the design and layout work is completed, it is only at the professional output center or printing factory that the high-grade roller scanner scans the original image at a higher resolution to output the film or plate that can be used for printing. Call this process "drop map." During the mapping process, the scanning and imposition of the images have to be redone again, often resulting in new errors, thereby reducing the overall efficiency of prepress production. This bottleneck arises mainly due to the small dynamic density range of the scanner and the low optical resolution, while the price of high-end professional scanners will not be reduced to a level acceptable to designers, so the problem is difficult to solve. . At present, some manufacturers have introduced platform scanners with larger dynamic density range, higher optical resolution, and price acceptable to designers, such as AGFA's DuoScan series and Linoty Pe-Hell's Saifei series, which have a nominal dynamic density. Range up to 3. O or 3.4, with a maximum optical resolution of more than 2000ppi. Although this type of scanner can be used to scan most draft documents and partially neutral highlights, such scanners are generally not used for demanding jobs.
(2) It does not have high-speed remote transmission means. When the electronic version of the design group version is sent to a professional output center or a printing plant, MO or an external hard disk are generally used. This transmission method is not too big for the two districts in the same city, but it also creates a bottleneck problem that affects the pre-press production efficiency for offsite delivery. This type of delivery may be performed multiple times due to revisions and other reasons. At present, professional output centers or printing plants have used special lines or microwave communications to transfer electronic documents to important customers with large print volumes. For example, there are printers in the United States that use T1 lines (up to 2000 MB/h) to connect with remote customers. The corresponding E1 line in China, but the use of the price is too high. With the rapid development of the telecommunications industry and the ever-increasing demand for prepress operations, it is believed that more and more professional output centers and printing plants will use high-speed dedicated line communications.
(3) The quality of employees is not suitable. For now, the greater impact on prepress production efficiency should be said to be that the professional quality of employees is not suitable. This phenomenon can often be seen: When a finished document is sent to a professional output center for output, it also causes waste due to various reasons, which prolongs the production cycle and wastes manpower and material resources. Arrangements and designers are not familiar with the printing process is the main reason leading to errors. The settings of the overprinting (or penetration), the setting of bleeding and bleeding, the setting of trapping, and the setting of the spot color version are often incorrect. Some errors are not easily detected on the film. It can be found after proofing. What's more, problems like bleeding settings that are not detected in a timely manner can cause malfunctions in the binding jobs after printing. Severe problems can lead to product obsolescence. After the CTP is applied, the film will no longer be used, and it will be more difficult to find the above-mentioned errors, resulting in greater time and material waste. In addition, with the rapid development of prepress technology, practitioners must update their knowledge in a timely manner and absorb new technologies in a timely manner so that the effect of design creativity can be improved and the efficiency of work can be improved.
In professional output centers or printing plants, there are the following aspects that are worth noting:
(1) Network environment. Due to the large number of high-resolution images to be scanned, the amount of data processed can be large. How to make data flow between scanning workstations, revision workstations, imposition workstations, servers, printers, RIPs, etc. quickly and efficiently. Carefully designing processes and maintaining a smooth production line will ensure the productivity of these professional units. For this reason, a fast network environment is necessary. An A4 format uncompressed CMYK image that satisfies printing needs about 1 OOs of data to be transmitted on a 1OMb/S network. The prepress center may have two or more scanners, scanning an average of 100 images per class. It takes about 3 hours to transfer these images from the scanning workstation to the server. Other operations, such as retouching or imposition, must also save images to or from the server, which obviously takes longer. Some units now use hot-pluggable, removable hard drives to “plug†scanned image data directly into a server or retouching workstation to solve the problem of slow network transmission. The 1OOMb/S network (Ethernet) that has been rapidly promoted in the last two years is about 5 to 6 times faster than the 1OMb/S network. Moreover, the investment needed to upgrade to a 10OMb/S network has been greatly reduced. In order to save investment, it is also possible to ensure that computers with large amounts of data transmission, such as scanning workstations, servers, revision workstations, RIPs, and imposition workstations, have 1 OOMb/s bandwidth. At present, the 100OMb/S Ethernet has just begun to enter the market and the price is still too high.
(2) Optimize data transmission by using a reasonable working method and file format. With a fast network environment, there is still a need to optimize the transmission of data over the Internet. To this end, the prepress field has established two related specifications: the OPI (Open Prepress Interface) specification and the DCS (Desktop Color Separation) specification. The OPI specification contains a series of comment statements that conform to Postscript. It allows low-resolution proxy images to be used for imposition, and the color separation output is automatically replaced by the OPI server to the corresponding high-resolution image. Both the desktop prepress system and the non-desktop prepress system can apply the OPI specification, thereby minimizing the pressure on network transmission and storage requirements. The DCS specification is an extension of the Encapsulated PostScript format. It can manage the entire color separation process of the desktop publishing system, which helps to shorten production time and reduce equipment requirements. The DCS specification includes a main EPS file and a plurality of high-resolution color separation files (DCS 1.O), and the main EPS file stores annotations for file names and paths of the respective color separation files. DCS 2. O only uses one file to contain all separation files. You can place, crop, and scale DCS files in imposition software. Since only the main EPS file is placed into the imposition software, the displayed low-resolution image is displayed at this time, which is favorable for improving the imposition efficiency. When you need to output a document containing a DCS file, imposition software locates and outputs a high-resolution separation file. Although both specifications can optimize the transmission of data, there is one important difference: When a document containing a DCS file is output in color separation, the generated PS file contains a high-resolution color separation file; the PS output in OPI mode The file does not include a high-resolution color separation file. It only contains OPI annotations. The OPI server replaces the OPI annotation with a high-resolution color separation file and sends it to a laser imagesetter or a PS printer. Therefore, OPI mode can greatly reduce the amount of network transmission and save output time. However, to achieve DCS can not use a dedicated server, and OPI must be achieved through a dedicated OPI server software.
Take Helios OPI software Ethershare as an example. It runs on a UNIX system and provides support for AppleTalk protocol and TCP/IP protocol. On this basis, Ethershare OPI software provides OPI services for PC or Mac imposition workstations. When separate image files (such as TIFF, EPSF, etc.) are stored in the OPI server, the OPI server will generate a corresponding file *.lay for typesetting in the corresponding folder. *.lay is actually an EPS file. Place *.lay in the imposition software. When outputting, the print-generated PS file is transferred to the print queue of the OPI server. When the print queue is sent to the output device, the OPI software checks the contents of the PS file and finds where there is an OPI comment, and inserts the corresponding high-resolution image there to achieve high-resolution output of the image.
After entering the CTP era, the film is no longer used. Instead, the customer's template files, files generated through CopyDot processing, and PDF files are printed in the computer, and the plate is directly output by the platesetter. Therefore, the documents are The requirements for effective management and data flow will be higher.
(3) Make full use of equipment resources such as PCs. With the socialization of prepress production operations and the proliferation of personal computers, it will be more and more common for documents made with PCs to be sent to professional prepress centers. Professional prepress output center environment is often based on the Mac machine, color separation, retouching, drop maps are generally completed by the Mac machine, RIP is mostly run on the Mac machine. In order to integrate the PC files sent by customers into their work environment, professional output centers often have to spend a lot of manpower to solve problems such as text movement caused by font replacement. In fact, as long as the appropriate software is configured on the PC, it can be used together with the Mac to "combat" and make full use of the PC's equipment resources. You can use PCs such as Windows NT or PC MacLan to network the PC with AppleTalk-protocol servers or Macs, and accept image files that have been scanned with a scanner and retouched via a Mac, and then output to a laser imagesetter or Spool via the Internet. . The process of prepressing with a PC is similar to that of the Mac. Today, PCs have high performance-to-price ratios and are flexible in configuration. If they can maximize their role, they will be both convenient and economical for customers. Of course, in various environments with different configurations, in order for the PC to integrate smoothly, technical personnel are required to make an attempt to find the most suitable method.
(4) Use a Chinese character library. Chinese fonts have always been a bottleneck in the desktop publishing system in China. In the past, there were few types of fonts and they were expensive. The current Chinese fonts are rich, forming a situation where ordinary users are mainly based on TrueType, and professional prepress centers have both TrueTyPe and Postscript fonts. It seems that the bottleneck problem caused by Chinese fonts seems to have gradually disappeared, but it is not. When you open a recently published book or magazine, you can often see the adhesion of Chinese characters and punctuation marks, the adhesion of English letters, or the mismatch between the fonts of the digital or English letters in the text and the Chinese character fonts. Some of these problems are caused by the lack of fonts themselves, and others are due to the lack of thoughtful consideration of some special provisions of typesetting software for Chinese typesetting. There is a problem with the text typesetting and the film needs to be re-exported, which will result in waste of man-hours and materials. If sloppy, it will seriously affect the aesthetics and reading effect of printed products. Therefore, this can only be explored in the process of using the manual method to adjust the output film. Because the adjustment process is very time-consuming, it will seriously affect the production efficiency and output. In software providers and font makers themselves
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