More history on OPI & FPO
More history on OPI & FPO
Just to expand somewhat on John Clifford's comments about OPI. The high res files would be stored locally to the RIP and the low res OPI images sent from the workstation over the network would contain a tag comment informing the RIP of the name of the high res files-(stored locally to the RIP) to be substituted in the place of the low res files sent by the workstation over the network.
Aside from the fact that the job would complete printing to the RIP's spool queue from a workstation far more quickly, and with less network traffic under OPI, as John Clifford indicated with the apt term "less bloat". The primary concept behind the reasoning for OPI being implemented, was to cut down on network traffic and network congestion-(back in the 10 base-T days).
As network speeds improved-(100 base-T, Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks) along with the processing power and speed of workstations, the issue of network traffic and network congestion ("Bloat") became a non-issue, effectively relegating the Open Prepress Interface to a thing of the past.
FPO images were used exactly as John Clifford described in the analog days. The only thing that I might add to his statement, is that the positioning of an image still must be communicated whether via an analog or digital workflow. So unless the individual ultimately responsible for determining the position of an image, actually positions the high res image data himself, upstream from your participation in the job? Then you may still be dealing with an FPO image, it just doesn't have the letters FPO blatantly written across the image as was commonly the case in the analog days.
Sorry Grasshopper, I don't know what OPO files are either.
Best Regards OT
