Prinergy question

[gig0]

We are a medium sized commercial/forms printer currently going through the onsite assistance startup training THIS WEEK and eventually migrating to a 100% Prinergy EVO workflow (w/ Preps) from a Brisque 4.1 within the next couple weeks.

My only question to fellow users who have upgraded is, what have you found to be the most reliable way to output from applications such as Quark and InDesign with Prinergy 4.0? I ask this because with the Brisque, we would normally print to the Imposed (or Ripped pages) hotfolder on the Brisque via postscript. I realize there a number of different ways to output now and printing via postscript would flatten the files. So what I'm asking , what is the general consensus among Prinergy users when outputting from applications such as Quark and InDesign? Export as PDF? Print using the refiner? Print to the vitual Prinergy printer?

Keep in mind, 98% of out files come from outside designers so we have no control over the originating files so there are many variables.

Thanks in advance and I may have a few more questions later on. So far, this workflow rocks!

 

[alarson]

Re: Prinergy question

Tell designers to output PDF 1.4 or newer. No flatten. Include fonts, and don't downsample the images there.

I recommend PDF format for images out of Photoshop into InDesign. Yup PSD format. It's the best for spot color handling and also works the best between the Creative suite products.

Make sure you have the PDF engine turned on for that job and watch 'er fly.

Quark is a little behind on the PDF stuff, but are trying hard. Don't forget that Quark wrote the DCS format, and Adobe won't ever work on any more code to support those.

Oh, and make sure there's bleed.

 

[SlaveToTheMan]

Re: Prinergy question

We just recently made the exact same switch. Finding that output to PDF in whatever the highest version the application will support works great. So, Indy CS3 docs Export to PDF 1.7, etc. Even Quark 7 gets PDF Output, believe it or not! The only oddity is Quark 6, still doing Postscript - at the suggestion of Kodak. You'll love Prinergy over Brisque, it's well worth the upgrade!

 

[alarson]

Re: Prinergy question

Quark 6 outputting PDF was a few sandwiches short of a good picnic, but is much better in 7. That's why it's better to stick with the good 'ol PS out.

I still remember outputting one color a night over a localtalk cable to a Lino 330 for a Trooper album cover. C Y A N ............

We used to have to be like bush pilots using duct tape to get stuff out the door. Bridging the film with our fingers in the dark so the silver wouldn't scratch the film... Disable screen savers to keep CPU tweaked... No Retrospect burn during a file copy. It's quite funny now to see what we did (and some people still do) to deliver the job on time.

Creative destructionism, as Alan Greenspan points out in his book Age of Turbulence is great at describing what any successful culture/business/economy must do to move forward. Stopping the ways we all did things in order to bring a paradigm shift. It's scary and necessary. And now back to *.prn files....

 

[gig0]

Re: Prinergy question

Good to see you're still around Slave!

One interesting thing I've noticed when submitting test files is EVO will let you manually map colors when the originating file is a PDF but won't allow mapping it if it's a postscript file. It's as if Prinergy encourages you to submit PDF's! Niiiiice!

I think the workflow will be officially going online this week and will use the CEPS conversion in a refine CTLW template to convert these Brisque files. YAY! If you know of any conversion issues there, let me know.

Thanks fellas! And Allan, loved the colorful analogy!