Editor’s note: This article and accompanying sidebar were contributed by Fusion Systems International in cooperation with the Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif., upon completion of the newspaper’s installation of FSI’s software. The articles have been edited by Newspapers & Technology.

The Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif., bolstered its prepress production by converting part of its workflow to an OS X-based raster management app.

The app includes Fusion Systems International’s DigiPage ROOM Workflow plug-in, now available for all Harlequin RIPs running on Windows, OS X and Linux.

DigiPage provides digital integrity proofing without third-party software or additional hardware, according to Fusion, and can automatically repair a number of production problems.



Roberth Guzman, ad production supervisor for the Daily Breeze, Beach Reporter, More San Pedro and Palos Verdes Peninsula News, looks at a Fusion RIPped full page and front page in FirstProof on a 23-inch Apple display.
Photo: Fusion Systems International
 

The Daily Breeze’s (average Monday-Thursday, 67,467; Friday, 76,022; Saturday, 74,047; Sunday, 70,594), new RIPs, DigiPage and FTIFF workflow plug-ins replaced outdated RIP technology from AII.

Streamline workflow

The deployment came a little more than a year after the paper shut down its on-site production plant and moved printing to Southwest Offset Printing in nearby Gardena, Calif. (see Newspapers & Technology, February 2005).

Daily Breeze pages are now sent to Southwest Offset for pairing, plating and printing on Goss International Corp. Mercury presses.

Transitioning to an outside print facility required several changes in the prepress production process. The Daily Breeze, which is created with a DTI NewsSpeed System (see Newspapers & Technology, November 2005), was previously RIPped to 1-bit TIFF separations that could be transferred to the remote printing facility. Southwest Offset’s weeklies and special inserts, which are all produced in QuarkXPress, were distilled to PDF and then transferred. The new apps will help to eliminate late file submissions, correction cycles, wasteful proofing, and production bottlenecks due to various technology limitations, Fusion said.

The app’s built-in capabilities for direct file printing, job-name cleansing, advanced true-page numbering, automated file routing and soft-proofing have reduced production time requirements and wasteful proofing materials usage, according to Joel Brodowski, director of information services and technology for the Daily Breeze.

Simplified prepress, shortened production

Prior to the FSI apps, the Daily Breeze used older DEC Alpha RIPs to convert PostScript from the DTI Speed Driver, which links back to a DTI database and pagination engine, to 1-bit TIFF separations. Although the RIPs worked, they were slow and hosted on unsupported hardware and operating systems, making them incompatible with evolving PostScript and PDF standards.

Production of weekly editions, typically created on older workstation hardware and older versions of QuarkXPress, required page layouts to be individually distilled, or saved out as PostScript pages, each correctly named and numbered. With a weekly count upwards of 300 pages, the process of making corrections and re-distilling pages stretched production out past midnight - often delaying submission of all pages to the remote printing facility.

“Installing Fusion Systems’ products saved the Daily Breeze prepress staff approximately 12 hours a week by eliminating the need to distill 300 or so pages from our weekly papers into PDF,” Brodowski said.

In addition to intermediate proofing during the regular production cycle, the transition to an outside printer necessitated the generation of hard-copy proofs at both the Daily Breeze and at Southwest Offset. This contributed to time and material waste, and because the proofs lacked digital integrity to the data used to make plate separations, it offered limited value toward overall quality control.

After researching FSI’s OS X RIPs and digital integrity workflow app, Jim Bush, network and production systems supervisor at the Daily Breeze, contacted the vendor. Following a demonstration and testing, the newspaper purchased three Fusion OS X RIPs, each with the DigiPage ROOM Workflow Plug-in, FTIFF 1-bit TIFF accelerator plug-ins, and FirstProof soft proofing apps.

“First Proof has enabled the Daily Breeze to save costs by eliminating much of the costly full-page proofs produced by roll-fed inkjet plotters with 100 percent size electronic proofs on Apple Cinema 23-inch displays,” Brodowski said.

To further simplify and accelerate production, the software was integrated to the paper’s specific workflow requirements.

Time savings immediately apparent

Soon after the apps were rolled out, Southwest Offset was able to trim the time needed to produce the Daily Breeze; hard proofing requirements, meantime, were eliminated entirely.

The impact on production of the weeklies has been even more dramatic, FSI said. Quark layouts are now printed directly to printer queues, eliminating page conversions to PDF and facilitating last-minute fixes and changes.

The Fusion RIPs handle jump pages, sectioning and output routing, saving staff eight hours - the amount of time that it used to take one full-time employee to create PDFs of Quark pages.

Display ad layout operators now print single pages or a series of pages to a published proofing queue and automatically generate a Fusion raster PDF that shows how the job will print.

Hard-copy proofing is minimized and the chance of errors on the final layout have been sharply reduced.

Finally, the apps oversee files, documents and publications created by outside customers. Built-in file name sanitizing automated the task of fixing obscured PDF file names. That feature alone cut by five hours the time it used to take to manually fix an externally produced weekly before it could be sent out for printing.