Locating Slivers/Scum Dot in Art

[Brad38CMU]

There is a push at my facility where I'm employed to clean up all of the small 'slivers' that are coming over in our art files. These areas are caused by contours not lining up perfectly with each other. There is sometimes a .0001" gap between contours and it will sometimes end up leaving one small row of pixels after the files have ripped. We have a large initiative in place to clean these areas up. Is anyone else having any success, in either Illustrator or PackEdge, being able to LOCATE these problem areas up front? The tools to fix these areas are obviously at our disposal, but as a whole we are having difficulties finding these areas before the job gets too far downstream. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

 

[Brad38CMU]

Someone help me!!!

 

[WI-Flexo]

I believe we have seen the "slivers" you are talking about. We seen them on screen when checking tiff's in viewer but they do not end up imaging on the plate. Are yours showing up on the plate? Im assuming your an Esko workflow from your Packedge reference. What type of plating are you doing?

 

[Brad38CMU]

Photopolymer, and we are seeing scum dot show up on our plates. A 1-pixel row at 2400 dpi will show up on our plates. These areas are a little easier to locate on the back end when checking the files in Bitmap Viewer, but they are also causing issues with our auto trapper in PackEdge. Do you know of any solution up front that can be implemented in either PackEdge or Illustrator before getting all the way downstream to ripping tiffs?

 

[WI-Flexo]

I think I misunderstood your original issue. The ones we still see are say at the edge of a trap to a background color and you would see a small sliver that followed the trap. If you hide the trap you dont see it. Show and it is there again. What I think the issue you are having is a straight 1 pixel void through all colors? If so I have seen that before also and it is coming from flattening the file somewhere in the workflow. We did have this issue and it DID expose to the plates. Depending on your workflow just output to tiff's at every export stage and see at what point they show up. Then you at least know what is causing the lines. Those are the only two instances where I have seen it.

Hope that helps.

 

[Brad38CMU]

Thanks a lot for your input. Many of the files that we receive are not put together very well from the designer and I think that is the main cause to these issues. Areas in these designs where the vector contours are supposed to be butt-fitting there is, say, a .0004" gap. Aside from manually panning through the files, we have not found an efficient method to locate these areas up front...they're causing us a lot of headaches!