South of the Malahat

Print Action, Aug 2004 by Robinson, Jon

Newspapers continue to be a barometer for the printing industry through the rise of the internet because dailies are about as timely and content rich as print can get in one sitting. Community newspapers, meanwhile, continue to thrive by providing uniquely localized news, sports, politics and classifieds.

"I do not see a threat to the community newspaper market, but I do imagine that over time readership for daily newspapers may show a slow decline as the internet becomes more available to more people and the younger generation who did not grow up reading papers get their information from news channels and the internet," says Al McGee, director of information technology at Island Publishers, based in Victoria, British Columbia. Island Publishers consists of 15 papers under a larger 60-page corporation owned by David Black, whose publications stretch from Manitoba to a spot just outside of Seattle - not including a Hawaiian-based paper.

McGee is in the final stages of a complete hardware and software overhaul at Island Publishers, which is the division farthest along its technology transition. He began 18 months ago by installing an Agfa imagesetter at its Ladysmith printing facility, with the much-needed mandate to adopt a complete PDF workflow. Before the arrival of the imagesetter, a driver would truck paste-ups the Ladysmith, or worse the eight hours to Port Hardy on the other side of Vancouver Island.

At around the same time as the imagesetter installation, McGee had just completed switching Island Publishers over to G4s and Mac OS X. Of course, this hardware configuration also begs for a software upgrade, and McGee decided to once again change platforms by installing Adobe's Creative Suite.

"It's a tough decision. A lot of people didn't buy Quark 5 so if you bought a G4 without a Classic [operating system] and you decide to buy Quark 6, you first have to buy the upgrade to Quark 5 because you cannot save from version 6 to version 4," says McGee. "If you are an agency and you have three or four computers, you probably upgraded to Quark 5 anyway, because you were forced to by the industry. We were not forced to do this by any industry because we print 90 per cent of what we own. We never upgraded to Quark 5."

While InDesign is still catching on as a page layout application, many printing companies are finally investigating the Quark versus Adobe platform debate because, like Island Publishers, they face a primary need for hardware upgrades. The issue of what software platform to install really depends on where a company fits into the graphic arts marketplace. Some graphic communications companies prefer working with Quark's application file because it opens up more re-purposing options or allows them to take more quality control over final output. While others will prefer the more uniform platform of Creative Suite

Adobe's offering was a natural choice for Island Publishers because it does print so much of what it owns and, therefore, has a near-perfect staging ground for building press-ready PDF files. Acrobat was a driving force behind McGee's platform switch. "When we send PDFs the pressmen just output them. Originally we were preflighting every one of the PDFs which became way too time-consuming so I said at some point we need to create only [press-ready PDFs]."

Of course, McGee also carries a laptop loaded with PitStop as he travels back and forth across Vancouver Island. PitStop is an Acrobat plug-in that allows him to pull apart a PDF and change a range of objects like text, images, line-art and colours as well as their attributes. "It is really just getting the PDFs from outside plants that is currently our biggest problem, because the small publications and the people who are still producing magazines out of their basements still give us Corel Draw files, Freehand files and that is a bit of a problem."

McGee's new technology platform also faces the problem of an in-house classified advertisement application that is based on the Classic operating system, with no plug-in or upgrade in sight. Community newspapers rely heavily on their classified revenues so this does present a major concern for the Island division. Island Publishers' production team no longer has Classic on their systems and, even if they did, McGee says there are too many inherent problems running on OS Classic for too long.

Because of these potential problems, McGee was forced to literally pull the Classic folder off of new eMac machines because the editorial department kept rebooting up in OS 9, when they had been set up to build in InDesign on OS X.

"I still have Quark running on one or two machines in every division. Even though all of the semi-display ads and so on are PDFs created with InDesign, we still have to build the classified pages in Quark, because we have no way yet of importing our classifieds into InDesign," says McGee, who says he wants to be free of Quark by October. "We are hoping that will be changed because so many third-party companies now building our classified program are saying no we are not going to build a plug-in for InDesign."