Aldus, Hell tying desktop to pre-press

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July, 1989 by James E Strothman

Aldus, Hell tying desktop to pre-press

New York City--Aldus Corp. and Hell Graphic Systems have agreed to develop a link between desktop publishing systems and Hell color pre-press systems. In a statement made at the Magazine Publishing Congress/Spring, the companies agreed to exchange technical information and to conduct joint training and support programs.

The interface, scheduled for release early next year, will be based on the Open Prepress Interface (OPI) specification that Aldus is promoting as an industry-wide standard. OPI defines how color, sizing, positioning and cropping for TIFF (tag image file format) images are encoded in PostScript. OPI also has been endorsed by Crosfield, DS America and Prepress Technologies.

The agreement is not intended to produce a product such as Scitex's Visionary, a Macintosh-based design/layout workstation with proprietary links to Scitex color prepress systems, representatives of both companies emphasize.

"It's our intention to support open interfaces and open architecture," says James Klauber, Hell's marketing director--though managing data using Hell systems will require some specific utilities and output drivers, he notes.

"Having control all the way to separations is a tremendous idea," says Barry Simon, art director of Games and a PageMaker user. He sees potential cost savings in avoiding trial-and-error separations, stripping and other pre-press charges.