Apogee Prepress & dielines

[capitalcolour]

New to Apogee... wondering if there is a way to set up defaults so that we can turn off application trapping in prepress letting the workflow handle all of the trapping, yet have a dieline overprint? Can specific colors be added somewhere so that it will recognize "dieline" for example and automatically overprint? Currently we manually set dielines to overprint in the application they are built in but this allows for other elements customers may accidentally trap or overprint to pass through.

[DCurry]

You can add the color to a library, but it doesn't seem to work real well if I recall. I've been using Apogee since Feb. and it does strange things sometimes, or features that should work don't always act as expected.

In addition to setting the dieline to OP in the native file (other rips don't require that extra step), I think you also have to set the ink to be Transparent (you can do this in Ink Manager in InDesign).

I'll check it out tomorrow. All of the times I've used dielines, there was no trapping underneath to be concerned about.

[Hopkins Printing]

New to Apogee... wondering if there is a way to set up defaults so that we can turn off application trapping in prepress letting the workflow handle all of the trapping, yet have a dieline overprint? Can specific colors be added somewhere so that it will recognize "dieline" for example and automatically overprint? Currently we manually set dielines to overprint in the application they are built in but this allows for other elements customers may accidentally trap or overprint to pass through.

Hi capitalcolour,

We have an action list in our Prepress system that looks for a color named "Die Line". When it finds it, it marks those page items for overprint. The only catch is the color MUST be named "Die Line" or perhaps "die line" for it to work. We just configure the die line color and name it accordingly in our InDesign/Quark applications.

Hope this helps!
Jon Morgan
Hopkins Printing

[DCurry]

That method requires that you have the add-on license for using your own PitStop actions, right?

[DCurry]

Okay, I looked into it a little further and this is what I've found (anyone feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken)

You can add the color "die" (or whatever you want to call it) to your Color Books under System Overview in the Generic Press module. There you can add the color, and set its parameters so that whenever Apogee sees a color with that name, these parameters are applied (in theory.) I say "in theory" because in practice, Apogee doesn't hold onto the Transparent setting when processing a file that uses the die color. I have to edit the plan and make it transparent in the Trapping module under Trapping Orders and Densities. Even if I set the die color to Transparent in InDesign it doesn't hold unless I do the above step.

So, in summary, here's what you need to do: Set the dieline to Overprint in the native app or PitStop; edit the Job Plan's Trapping module to set the die color to Transparent and that will keep the dieline overprinting and nothing will trap to it, but everything underneath it will trap correctly.

Does anyone know why the Transparent setting on the ink doesn't hold?

[DCurry]

I think I found it. If I set the Ink Densities to Search Books instead of Application Value, it works. Is there any harm in leaving it this way? It's just using the book values to determine which colors are darker, right?

[Hopkins Printing]

That method requires that you have the add-on license for using your own PitStop actions, right?

That's correct. You would need the Enfocus Preflight license (not the Apogee Preflight license).

Cheers,
Jon