Basic Workflow Standardization

[mattbeals]

Good advice to learn Publisher and how it works with color and objects. Simply put Publisher relies on Windows GDI (the underlying graphics engine for display and printing) to create objects. Publisher, and most all other Windows programs except for Adobe & Quark products, basically "asks" GDI to create "objects" for it. Everything GDI does is in sRGB which is why everything Office is sRGB. There are driver tricks to make gray objects gray, but that converts them to device gray and not black. Black is what you want, not gray. Gray (device gray) cannot overprint CMYK or device N (spot colors). So right there two of your output "styles" (full color and black plus 1) is wrong right off the bat. Callas pdfToolbox is smart enough to figure all of this out without the need for you to "man handle" the art. As I said before much, if not all, of the common things you will need to do can be done using tools you have now with pdfToolbox. Assuming you have Acrobat Pro 6 or later and the rest of Creative Suite then you've got the core foundation if you have to manually edit files. Again, pdfToolbox Server or plug-in makes these tasks of converting Office files much easier.

That's not to say that PitStop is NOT a good tool. But pdfToolbox is simply better at some of these functions.

[SoerenL]

Hi Cory,

I openly admit I work for the vendor with the big H and therefore might have a slightly narrowed view .
Within the Prinect product range there are two tools I suggest to have a look at:

Prinect Prepress Manager with Remote Access
Autmatically preflights incoming files without manual checking. Your (internal) customer gets an immediate online report which shows problems or errors and enables him to correct those. Or you can still accept the file with errors - depending on the log in.
Heidelberg - Preflighting and Data Optimization

Prinect PDF Assistant
This is a manual Acrobat plugin, which also can use Pistop rules. Compared to the above its more manual, but the advanatge is you can just simply add that to your existing workflow/set-up.
Heidelberg - Prinect PDF Toolbox - PDF Assistant

In case of questions, just check with your Heidelberg rep

[PDQDUNDEE]

Cory

It would be of interest to most of us I'm sure to learn what you have gained from this discussion. What route will you take and perhaps why and what would you hope to achieve?

Peter

[AlexH]

Hi there,
As head of business development for Enfocus in North America, I obviously have a vested interest in this thread. However, I think it would be well worth your time to evaluate two of our products to optimize/automate your workflow.

As noted in a prior post, PitStop Professional 08 can address many of the problems you encounter with supplied PDFs. And while you can preflight with Acrobat Pro, PitStop offers much more flexibility in terms of the fixes and tweaks you can apply to files to make them properly run on each of your systems. The pure black text and teeing up two-color jobs are perfect examples of where we can help out.

The second question, regarding workflow automation, is more strategic. Here our Switch product enables you to eliminate manual intervention on numerous minor tasks. It is file-format and application neutral, so you can deal with just about any type of file, and runs in conjunction with the most common DTP applications. Beyond productivity, Switch enables you to standardize operations, which delivers more consistent results with fewer errors.

ALl our products can be downloaded and tested for 30 days, so you can determine for yourself whether or not they will deliver sufficient ROI. Please contact me off line if you are interested in discussing this further: 215.247.3461.