Master Templates vs. Job Specific Templates

[oxburger]

Gathering your thoughts here or what your company does regarding templates. When creating a 16 page 8.5 x 11 saddle stitch book for example, do you use a master template that you link to, or do you save a template under each job that you have on your system? We have master templates, but we usually only use them as a starting point because when our impositions are created by the higher ups, they constantly change gripper, color bar placement, or the paper may be different, etc. It makes making master templates essentially useless, so were forced to use it only as a starting point and then alter it and save it under the job number it's used in. Do any of you use master templates for imposition? or are you in the same boat as me where nobody can make up their mind and make it easy on everyone? It's not a huge deal as it only takes a couple of minutes to alter a template to fit a job's specs, but we now have a gazillion templates on our server.

 

[Al Ferrari]

Exactly what imposition software uses these templates you refer to?

 

[oxburger]

sorry, should have mentioned that. Agfa ApogeeX.

 

[splenguin]

In the ~3 years since installing Upfront, we've built just shy of 14,000 individual press layouts. However, we also have about fifty master layouts [always increasing] that cover our most common scenarios. We don't have any trouble with moving marks and things since these are for the most part very basic layouts that don't have much room for adjustment anyway. On the contrary, we've got a few master layouts that are useful specifically because the marks are the same every time - if we have a job that must have, say, a specific set of takeoff bars in order to hit color, we'll make it into a master to ensure repeatability. I should mention that we're a Prinergy shop, and to make the most use of master layouts, we use RBA to import the layout, make sure it's matched up to the correct press, and send diagrams to DP. The only thing it won't do is send bindery data. Now that I think about it, we do use a few of them as starting points only - for jobs that always require a job-specific adjustment - but these are useful as well because we know that the "template" is correct and up-to-date.

 

[Maciej Baur]

When I trained customers I always start from building a good naming conventions for signatures and templates (in Preps with Imposition Template Manager option in Apogee). It makes template library more easy to manage. For common impositions like books and brochures I prefare to use only final sheet size and binding style for template name (like: "210x297_PB" for A4 jobs in perfect boud) and next all signatures inside that template use A4 pages so the signature names doesn't contain that info but only press sheet details like size, work style, number of pages etc (for example: "1000x700_2x8_WT" for B1 sheet with 2x 8 pages in work and turn). I tried to use the same gripper for all signatures and change that for particular jobs using Apogee function in Press TP.
Those library can be made using some "master templates" as a starting point but most of the time when I use smart marks, creating new signature or template from scratch is very quick. Sometimes I prefere copy and paste one signature and make small changes to create new signature in the same template.
That is my way of working