The Times-Mail in Bedford and The Herald-Times in Bloomington, Indiana dailies owned by Schurz Communications Inc., installed workflow software from Polkadots Software to manage their production.

The papers rolled out Polkadots’ PrePageIt NewsFlow software because of its redundancy and automated page pairing and proofing features, Polkadots said.

“One of the features of NewsFlo that has helped us at The Herald-Times is the ability to pre-RIP all of our ads before they are output to film,” said John Matson, electronic production manager. “We are a morning paper and all of the ads are done on the dayside while pages are output that evening. We now know, before the creative service department leaves for the day, that all ads will print without error when the page is output by the evening shift.”

The page imposition functionality of NewsFlo’s Pair-it module was also key to The Herald-Times, saving the newspaper (daily, 27, 530;  Sunday Hoosier Times, 43,267) considerable time over its previous manual or desktop imposition methods, Matson said.

“We look at this as our first step in going to computer-to-plate,” he said. “We now have a database record of all the pages that have been sent, approved and output, as well as how many times each has been sent. In addition, we have the ability to set up an output configuration for black-and-white, color, yellow direct and even outputting the black later in the evening.”

The 13,147-circ Monday-through-Saturday evening Times-Mail switched to CTP three months ago and has cut its production time in half, according to Production Manager Stacey Brown. NewsFlo has been key in fixing PDF-related problems, he said.

“It is now possible to catch errors and problems before the product hits the presses,” Brown said. “NewsFlo simply will not print a corrupted or bad file and will generate an error detailing the problem.” 

In addition to printing its own paper, The Times-Mail does a large volume of commercial work.

“We can run outside customers’ PDF files through PrePage-it NewsFlo and eliminate problems with their files,” Brown said.

Montreal-based Polkadots’ software is distributed exclusively in the United States by Flashlight Digital.