Recent content by bky

I usually don't have an issue with trapping varnishes. Even if you accidentally trapped a gloss to a dull varnish...well, they are transparent and pretty forgiving. Sounds like you've got flood gloss varnish (overprint everything) and spot dull varnish (again, set to overprint). The file should...

I have experience in optimizing variable data applications. Can you tell us more about your variable data needs? That makes a big difference in which program to suggest. What type of native files (layout and data) do you get? Does the customer make revisions to the native document after the...

I've run high line screen (350-400) work before, along with using stochastics for many years. Both require extensive process control procedures throughout the shop. I've been where you are: in prepress, trying to solve process control issues out in the pressroom. It's hard work, but if you run...

300 is high for a standard: you'd need to have a good #1 sheet as your house stock to do that daily. I don't know about your marketplace, but every area I've worked in has a low #2 or high #3 grade sheet as the house stock. I worked in a shop that ran 275 lpi on any #1 grade sheet, and it was a...

Andy, Great post.

Up to 12,000 photo-quality pages per month is beyond what most home-based printers can handle. The service that will require is going to be considerable. If you've got some volume now, try contacting your local copier rep (Ikon, RJ Young) and see if they have suggestions. They often have some...

Reducing the line screen helps reduce the appearance of mottling. When a dot varies in size or shape from the dot next to it, you can see mottling, particularly if the dots are varying because of small variations in the printing surface. Larger dots can help hide the variation, along with...

For the record, XMPIE 4.6 Build 4234 for Mac doesn't work with Adobe InDesign Mac CS5 7.0.0.355. It fails to load. XMPIE doesn't say it works past CS4, but I wanted to share the results from compatibility testing. I'm running 10.6.4 on a Core 2 Duo.

Halftone is the magic word you seek.

I had no idea they were still in business.

It doesn't make sense for us on smaller jobs either, but for larger ones (>30 min) it can be very effective. Being able to run ID serially would be nice, but still doesn't have the some of the advantages that parallel processing does (feeding batches to multiple machines for example). CS5 may...

Ok, my versions are older, and the ability to use more than one core hasn't been consistent with newer versions of XMPIE. I will do a few tests, but this is what works under CS3/10.4.11/XMPIE 3.5 PSTOPDF is the process name under XMPIE3.5. I believe the XMPIE4 plug-in calls it RUNNORM. If you...

Just a few questions before I go into detail. What version of XMPIE/CS3/MacOSX are you running? When you are actively using XMPIE's Dynamic Print, how much % of the CPU is being used by Adobe InDesign or the process called "pstopdf"? InDesign should first go to 80-95% while spooling all the...

XMPIE doesn't have the limitations of InDesign's Data Merge. If you use XMPIE for Dynamic Print to PDF, XMPIE will create merge records into the layout into a temporary, fat PS file (not into a new document). Then the PS file is processed and imposed into an optimized PDF file (thin). You can...

I use Filemaker Pro for database programming, but I wouldn't use it for output. There are many drawbacks, not the least of which is that it doesn't write any VPD output streams (PPML, VPS, Opt-PDF, etc). That means the output is very, very fat. I also have huge problems printing from Windows...