The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., is reinventing how it produces the paper.

This spring, the newspaper (daily, 38,398; Sunday, 51,573) installed two Advantage computer-to-plate units and associated software from Agfa. It also rolled out Agfa’s Arkitex workflow app in a bid to automate production of its daily, five weeklies and a handful of commercial jobs the publisher prints at its facility, according to Prepress Manager Shelley McCann.

This month, the publisher is rolling out ad entry and layout software from Brainworks Software, followed by Xpance ad tracking software from Morcor Solutions.

“We’re full speed ahead with all of these installs,” McCann said. “They’re all going on at the same time.”

Once all of the new apps are in place, The Times Leader will have automated everything from layout to plate output.

“Pages go through our layout program into our pagination system and from there we typeset and there’s a script that sends pages to Arkitex,” McCann said.

Through Arkitex, The Times Leader automated processes based on the type of job, whether it’s a tab or broadsheet, the number of pages and color positions. For example, impositions happen automatically for tabs.

“As far as the daily paper, everything is based on our layout, and once it’s typeset through our pagination system it automatically flows into Arkitex and the pages appear as they will in the paper, which has been the best feature for us,” McCann said.

Soft proofing capability

Arkitex also lets The Times Leader soft proof and view each of the CMYK channels to ensure everything is separating properly, which McCann said has allowed the paper to catch a lot of errors.

“From soft proofing, it’s just a simple check mark as to colors (plates) that we want to release,” she said. “We check them and they’re sent out to the Advantage units.”

In addition to allowing staffers to see pages as they will appear in print, McCann said the app affords the paper significant timesavings.

“Everything is tracked and the efficiency with it is just phenomenal.”

The next step in shoring up the workflow will be to use Arkitex to manage jobs sent to the paper’s FTP site.

“The customizations we can do with this program are endless and we’re really just in the beginning stages of it right now,” McCann said. “We’re exploring all of its capabilities and we really want to use them all.”