Juggling plates - computer-to-plate printing - includes related article on companies involved in digital platesetting

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Dec 15, 1994 by Steve Wilson

But Publishers Press has no problem with the Eskofot, as proved by advertisers in the September issue of Bobit's Contemporary Orthopaedics. "The biggest hurdle in this process is how to translate advertising into digital information," says art director Rick Schank. Until a digital standard is accepted by the advertising community, no magazine can go direct-to-plate in its entirety without first scanning advertisers' mechanicals or films. Publishers Press is currently the only printer that digitizes ads, using the $120,000 Eskofot. Schank says advertisers in the digitized issue "didn't notice anything different, not a hiccup." His concern, and a reason the magazine will wait until next year before going direct-to-plate permanently, is logistics: "We have to work out a system in terms of getting their films and materials in on time, because advertisers are notoriously late."

There's no proof

Both advertisers and publishers have reason for concern about what computers will do to the look of their products, and not just because of scanner quality. Although the elimination of film does away with certain costs and waste, it also eliminates the possibility of a mechanical proof.

Don Reeves, senior vice president of systems at R.R. Donnelley, says the company will offer clients the option of proofs from a color printer after a page has been electronically imposed and RIPped. But hard-copy proofing could significantly eat into the time and money savings the CTP method offers in the first place. Whereas CTP plates are produced in three to four minutes, it takes Hewlett-Packard's HP 650C, one of the quickest and cheapest color printers, 10 minutes and 60 cents per square foot to produce a proof. Hence larger magazines may not find it time-efficient or economical to proof every plate.

In fact, Reeves believes the new technology eliminates the problems that require proof checks in the first place. "When a page has been pasted up and chemicals have been used on the film, the printer needs to show the customer that they haven't sliced off the chairman of the board's head," he says. "[With digital printing], most problems would occur at the publisher's location. When files come to us, we're developing confidence that the magazine doesn't require another proofing."

However, as an incident at Publishers Press shows, printers are not above making a few mistakes of their own. In the September issue of Spectroscopy, certain scientific characters were garbled by Publishers' imposition software. The press operators didn't notice the glitch, and the mistakes made their way into the final published product. "Spectroscopy is a technical journal," says Joseph Schoor, editorial product manager at Advanstar's Publishing Division. "A single character out of place in a paragraph can render it meaningless." Indeed, Advanstar is holding back from further CTP runs until the printer devises a proofing system.

Who believes in WYSIWYG?

Dan Weber, vice president of sales at Publishers, feels a "soft-proofing" procedure, where the final version of a page is approved on a monitor, should be sufficient to combat such problems. "If you're in a real desktop world, what you see on the screen and the laser proofs you print out should be your final proofs," he says.