Use of prepress automation in the Czech Republic and examples of automated processing for selected prepress tasks

Abstract

The work is focused on the prepress and possibilities of its automation. The article provides a brief overview of main prepress operations together with software products available for their automation. The information on problematic areas of prepress processing and current use of software tools and prepress automation in the Czech Republic was gathered via the survey with almost a hundred participating companies. The questions about the type of company, the number of its employees and the number of orders received per day were also included so that the results could be better evaluated. As expected, most of the problems in prepress are connected to the printing data received from customers. The reported frequency of different issues and the time needed for the corrections are presented. The results also show that while almost half of the participating companies use a workflow system, which is the main means of automation, often it is not used to the full extent. Further, different possibilities of automated processing were demonstrated for three common issues selected on the basis of the survey results. The tasks included correction of files with default printer marks and a missing bleed, which belong to the most frequent problems, and adding the missing data for processing steps; this issue does not occur so often, but the participating companies reported they spend more time with its solution. The example PDF files were created in Adobe Illustrator and then processed in Adobe Acrobat, Callas pdfToolbox Desktop, Xerox FreeFlow Core, Enfocus PitStop Pro, and Esko Automation Engine. It was verified that when the given software includes the appropriate editing functions and the automated processing is employed, all the tasks can be accomplished very quickly – in the case of the example printing data, it was in less than a minute, usually in a few seconds. Based on the findings, the applicability and benefits of the alternatives considered are outlined. The comparison of functionality of the software tested and a number of their implementations in the participating companies suggests the important role of local resellers and support.