Finding the best road to pages

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June, 1990 by Jeff Parnau

Learn how to prepare a DTP-produced page for the finishing it needs, or your money may i vanish.

Not everyone who uses DTP is able to produce finished pages. In some cases, DTP doesn't have the production muscle to complete the page. In other cases, the publisher chooses to limit his or her involvement in terms of completely finishing the job.

Put another way, DTP has lots of limitations. If a page isn't complete and ready to plate, someone must finish it. But if the publisher doesn't know exactly how to prepare the page for the particular finishing it will need, lots of money can disappear. To prevent that magic vanishing act, the page must either be prepared completely, or prepared in anticipation of final integration into plate-ready film.

Integration can take place at the high end or the low end.

* The high end: Some of the high-end solutions come from Scitex, Crosfield and others. The approach is to use low-end scanners and low-end color proofers and have the publishing staff make all stripping decisions on small computers. Later, the material is drawn into more expensive equipment for final scans and film assembly. (Buzzword: High-end connectivity.) The entry price tag is usually $75,000 or more for the publisher-plus a trained staffer or two (which can make that $75K look like peanuts real quick).

The even-higher high-end technology is coming along, too. With new film "faxing" technology emerging in the weekly newsmagazine field, even full-page, full-color negatives can be transmitted to the printer electronically, via satellite. But at a cost of $60 to $80 per page transmission, the obvious question is, who needs it?

The newsweeklies.

* The low end. Regardless of available technology, most publishers fall into the group of low-enders. Typically, a publisher uses only that technology which helps him or her perform those functions required of that publishing operation: design, layout and proofreading. That's the stuff of which magazines are truly made, and many (if not most) publishers will gladly hire a vendor to perform subsequent tasks, such as film preparation and color work.

But then, the page must be economically integrated into the system. High-end integration is expensive. Low-end integration is merely tricky.

The single area that most clearly demonstrates the question of low-end integration is advertising itself. Suppose someone sends you a full-color ad. How does it get into your desktop system? It doesn't. It is sent to the printer or prep house and somehow inserted by hand. So can DTP allow you to control "all of your film preparation costs," as some have claimed? No way. Not unless you've figured out how to get those loose advertising negs into a Macintosh or IBM PC.

And because most publishers don't scan color photos, the same holds true for editorial color. If you're not connected to a high-end integration computer, someone puts the color photos in manually.

That probably sounds simple enough. How can you go wrong? Oh, let me count the ways.

We recently (and finally) got rid of a customer who refused to consider the questions of integration. The client assumed that if it looked good on his screen, it would look just as good in print. He delivered "final" negatives to us, and our job was to insert the color photos and separated artwork.

Listen up, production novices. If someone says "bleed," don't stick yourself with a rusty X-acto knife. What they want is to have the image run off the page, usually by 1/8 inch. Printing presses must print beyond the page in order for an image to "run off it. Later, the magazine is trimmed, and it only appears that the image really "runs off."

This customer's DTP "expert" said it was extremely difficult for him to run the image off the page because he had built all his pages to final trim" size. So his negatives would come in to our firm with fancy tints and panels-none of which bled. The solution? Extreme. We'd use the negatives as layouts. We'd rebuild the page manually, and scrap the negatives. Then we'd advise the customer that we were charging him an additional few thousand dollars. We'd talk to his DTP expert. And next issue-wham: No bleeds.

And if you're told to choke, don't grab a cucumber and stuff it whole into your mouth. "Choke" is a lithographic term for bleeding one color into another by a thousandth of an inch or more. It's used to prevent the printing press from creating a tiny white outline where two colors meet.

This customer's software could not do a choke (or a spread or a fatty or a skinny or whatever else you may call it). So we'd get these fancy color panels with type that needed. to be choked or spread. And what did we have to do? Scrap it all and start over.

Our final recommendation to this customer was simple: Use the DTP program for what it can do well, but leave the nasty stuff to the experts, We suggested that they run their type, rules and black tints to negatives, but to forget about trying to do color work on their system. They had neither the knowledge nor the appropriate software to do the job. They were wasting hundreds, of negatives per issue, and we were redoing all their work. What did they do? They told us we didn't know what we were talking about, and eventually took their business-' elsewhere. No love was lost. Big questions