Metrix, Preps and Workflows

[SteveClarkNo1]

What do you know about using Metrix in Apogee-X or Prinergy? How can I get Preps 4.1 (Mac OS9) to talk to each other? I guess I'm supposed to be able to use my old Preps templates in Metrix, but it doesn't seem to be working. Is there anyone out there that has done this?

Does anyone have any insight on using either Preps or Metrix in Apogee-X or Prinergy? What about thought on Apogee-X versus Prinergy in general?

[splenguin]

I don't know that it's possible to use old Preps layouts in Metrix. I know that marks won't translate, as the systems and file formats are different. It may be possible to export from Preps to something that Metrix can import, but what we found when we moved from Preps [Upfront] to Metrix was that it was so easy to rebuild a given layout in Metrix and save it as a Standard, it would've been more trouble than it was worth to figure out how to use the Preps template itself - especially since you'd have to re-place marks anyway. This is coming from a shop that uses a LOT of different types of layouts. On the back end, we're sending JDF from Metrix to Prinergy, which we've had virtually no trouble with.

[SteveClarkNo1]

Going from Metrix via JDF to Prinergy would be ideal for us since we already have Metrix. That would save me having to upgrade Preps. I have a technical question though. How do I get Metrix to recognize my .eps color bars? Do I really have to open, crop and export them to .pdfs?

[rich apollo]

Could you go from Preps via JDF output?

[splenguin]

The marks have got to be PDF for Metrix, with attending PNGs for preview. I wasn't real excited about migrating the entire library either, but in the end it turned out to be a good opportunity for some housecleaning. You need to tell Metrix the exact dimension of each mark, so wherever possible I changed them to a semi-even number, and also took the opportunity to establish a new naming scheme, that made more sense than the years-old, random scheme we were using with Preps. In the end it took less than a day. I was able to throw out a lot of old marks, and the ones we still use are now better organized. Making the PNGs is no big deal either: open in Acrobat, save as PNG, done. One drawback is updating marks [which I believe Lithotecnics is working on]: as they are all kept locally, they need to be updated on each machine. We've been using Powerswitch to push out the new set with every update to each station with Metrix. And one further note: Metrix does not support "dupmarks", so we had to make a separate mark for each size and type of colorbar. We had some issues with resaving dupmarks as PDFs for Metrix use, and apparently the extra EPS code that makes them extendible caused issues, so a quick copy-paste to a new document was necessary.

Maybe someone else could comment on Preps-JDF-Metrix functionality, but I still don't think it would be worth the effort, even if it was possible.