Imposition Upgrade or New Imposition

[TJ-421]

I briefly used Preps in school, spent a year doing production imposition in Metrix a couple years after that, and have now been imposing in Signastation for a little over a year, with a year's break doing other work in between. That is to say, I can't offer a direct comparison, but felt I had the best experience working in Metrix. I occasionally find Signa to be a little too "helpful" about populating my press sheet when I'm supposed to run x-up of a piece with specific gutters but the sheet will accommodate y-up instead: I wind up either backing out and restarting the imposition as a montage, or building a custom layout scheme that gets used once and then gets forgotten about even if it winds up becoming useful again down the road. The one issue we had with Metrix (circa 2009?) was with rotating 1-ups to different angles for certain specific envelope layouts we used, and I think this was on their radar even at that time.

Hope this helps,
-TJ

[JulieWatson]

These are all potential valuable solutions to replace your current imposition software, but my question to you is what type of integration do you need and what level of automation do you want? Are you looking for a planning tool or a production tool? These questions will guide you to make the right choice for your organization.

Besides trying a demo of all the available solutions my suggestion to you is first determine your needs, and then see how the different vendors can meet your needs.

You have to think differently about imposition today, it's more than just imposing pages, you must think about automation and how your imposition package will allow you to drive results today, and grow with you in your future projects.

Julie
Ultimate
imposition.com

[pcmodem]

I would also recommend looking at Metrix. The company I was working at before was using Preps 5 and was working on switching to Metrix. We had looked at Preps 6 and realized it was going to take relearning the software so decided to look for alternatives. What we found with Metrix was more than just an imposition tool. It is true job planning software. It takes Preps and Upfront (Job Planning software from Kodak) merges them together and makes a better product in the end.

[margadri]

I would also recommend looking at Metrix. The company I was working at before was using Preps 5 and was working on switching to Metrix. We had looked at Preps 6 and realized it was going to take relearning the software so decided to look for alternatives. What we found with Metrix was more than just an imposition tool. It is true job planning software. It takes Preps and Upfront (Job Planning software from Kodak) merges them together and makes a better product in the end.

I think that putting Preps and Upfront together was the original idea with Preps 6.
IMHO I think it backfired!

[ajr]

Dynastrip is probably the best if you are just doing normal impos not automated stuff works well with Rampage. Not the best but I used to use an old version may have got better now. Get a demo give it a go!