The Dayton (Ohio) Daily News and Salt Lake City Tribune each installed Prima Esprit auto-impositioning and Prima Colorware color management software from Harland Simon.

The Daily News will use the software to improve color management across its three Koenig & Bauer AG presses while The Tribune will use the apps in its TKS (USA) pressline.

Jim Lothrop, director of press operations at Newspaper Agency Corp., which publishes The Tribune, said Esprit eliminates the time crews formerly spent manually writing run configurations.

“We were writing new run configurations daily and it was taking up many hours of our time just to discover that we could not get all the requested color positions,” he said.

When NAC picked up The New York Times’ printing contract, pressure mounted further, Lothrop said.

“Their run configurations were totally different than anything we had run. We were writing runs by hand on paper for hours” and sometimes those runs still didn’t work, he said.

With Esprit, crews know within minutes whether a certain run will work or not. “We can then look at alternative configs through the software and check for the best options.”

Times officials, meantime, can access the prospective run configurations through Esprit and make their own recommendations, if needed.

Esprit also archives runs, giving press crews a library they can tap into, Lothrop said.

“We’re still very new to the program and there is much to learn,” Lothrop said. “It works very well.”