Trapping Software, any advice?

P

Phish

Active member
Hi,

I was wondering if anyone out there could spare some of there time and let us know what is a good Trapping Software out there?

I have had nothing but nightmares dealing with Esko, i could not even get there free trial to work and then got forgotten about for 3 months which ontop of other things, has now made me look else where for a good piece of trapping software.

We do not have the facilities in our RIP so everything needs to be done by hand, we are a screen printers just so you know, due to the time scale it takes creating trapping by hand in Illustrator, i wanted to find an affordable trapping program that could be used with Illustrator.

I found Esko, saw all the video's on Youtube and it was exactly what i wanted however the service i have had from them is nothing more than terrible, i have not even seen the program work yet for my own eyes.

What is everyone else using or could you please advice us on some names of trapping programs to look out for? We mainly use Illustrator so was thinking of getting a piece of software that works like a plug in so to speak.

Alternative is to get out RIP trapping software working but it is not the best (RTI RIP KIT - our RIP)

Many thanks

Phil.
 
For packaging at least ESKO is the gold standard (though it isn't perfect). I haven't had such service issues like you've mentioned with ESKO. Most of the commercial print trapping software I've worked with is basically automatic and take-it-or-leave-it results or they expect you to pick through layer after layer of normalized chunky PDFs to tweak or correct traps.

You can download a FREE trial of PowerTrapper here.

Since you are a screen printer are you currently manually trapping in Illustrator?
 
Many thanks for the reply,

I currently do all my trapping by hand in Illustrator (vectored images) and if i need anything trapping rasterized i will use Photoshop, nothing wrong with doing these type of trapping by hand however it can get long winded and time consuming.

I have hopefully managed to get someone from Esko in England to pop in and see us to correctly install the Illustrator plug-in of Instant Trapper, whether this plug-in will be what we are looking for, i have no idea, it would be nice to have something that could speed up our production times that is taken up with hand trapping of documents.
 
PowerTrapper is way more powerful than InstantTrapper but I suppose you'll need to evaluate which best suits your needs. I do encounter artwork where I still have to manually trap items. I am in the US and I've never worked with ESKO-UK. The install is extremely straight-forward and use is pretty straight-forward as well but the documentation does leave a bit to be desired.
 
Power Trapper maybe a lot more powerful than Instant Trapper, totally understand that however the price tag that comes with it is not nice, we have been quoted at nearly £6000 for the Esko Power Trapper and that by any standard is alot of money.

We are not a big printers so i am looking at a more economical way (its all about the monies in today's world as you probably know) however i want good value for money.

I am not looking at something that will totally cure the trapping side of things, as that will make us rely to much and we may not look out for things as we should do, however it would be nice to have that option on tricky jobs at times.

What happened on the plug-in install i have no idea, i downloaded it, installed it, restarted Illustrator and it came up with an option about Esko, accidentally pressed something wrong, it disappeared and due to this, i have not been able to get it working again. No idea what happened to it, all i want to do is give it a trial so i can see if it actually works and does what it says it does so to speak.
 
We use the automatic trapping feature in Nexus, I've never had any problems with it. I can't remember the last time I had to manually trap something, it has definitely been years.
 
Hi Phish,

There is a guide online to activate your license / use your trial software... Check out this link. Once you closed the activation window you can still go to the AI help menu (esko/esko plugins) to get it working...

Hope this helps!


Phish said:
Power Trapper maybe a lot more powerful than Instant Trapper, totally understand that however the price tag that comes with it is not nice, we have been quoted at nearly £6000 for the Esko Power Trapper and that by any standard is alot of money.

We are not a big printers so i am looking at a more economical way (its all about the monies in today's world as you probably know) however i want good value for money.

I am not looking at something that will totally cure the trapping side of things, as that will make us rely to much and we may not look out for things as we should do, however it would be nice to have that option on tricky jobs at times.

What happened on the plug-in install i have no idea, i downloaded it, installed it, restarted Illustrator and it came up with an option about Esko, accidentally pressed something wrong, it disappeared and due to this, i have not been able to get it working again. No idea what happened to it, all i want to do is give it a trial so i can see if it actually works and does what it says it does so to speak.
Click to expand...
 
Hi Jose,

DOH!!!!

Now i feel like a right dummy after reading your last comment, many thanks by the way, with not using this software before, and talking to Esko Reps, i had no idea and was not told about this at all, think i might give it a go now?

Back to my original question though, what does everyone else on here use for trapping their jobs then? Nothing beats doing it by hand however it can take along time plus some things are easier than others also.

What difference is there between Instant Trapper and Power Trapper? Is it hard to set up or confusing to use as i will have to find a way to teach others how to use it also.
 
pacart said:
We use the automatic trapping feature in Nexus, I've never had any problems with it. I can't remember the last time I had to manually trap something, it has definitely been years.
Click to expand...

Can i ask, what is NEXUS? Never heard of it?
 
The instant trapper is an interactive trapper. You choose object per object how you want to apply the trapping. There are options to add trapping to complete objects to make life easier. I really like it, it's easy to use. Puts the trap object on a separate layer which makes it easy to delete or change trapping. The Powertrapper can be used fully automatic, you define trapping settings hit the button and you get the trap result in the trapping pairs. You can still easily change per trap object the distance / direction etc... Or define rules and save them for later use.

I don't know the complexity of your artwork files. Powertrapper might be a better fit if you work on a lot of files per day with complex trapping needs. If that's not the case instant trapper is great as well. Budget plays an important role I think:) There is indeed a huge price difference!!

Nexus is one of the workflow's of Esko. Can handle trapping on ArtPro or PDF files. I think nowadays nexus workflow is integrated in the Automation Engine workflow.
 
Heidelberg offers a PDF Trapping solution that is an Acrobat plugin. It will trap any PDF. It was called Supertrap when it launched and won a GATF Intertec Award as the world’s first PDF offline trapping engine. Today, it migrated to Prinect Trap Editor as part of our PDF Toolbox software suite. The PDF is still native after trapping, the traps are just a layer and can eailty be edited. We have been trapping transparency for over 6 years. Here is a link, go to download for the brochure.

Heidelberg - Prinect PDF Toolbox
 
I just wanted to say a huge thankyou to all that have read my topic and a bigger thankyou to all that have left a reply also, my search will go on to find the best trapping software out there however my budget does limit me alot to what i can afford. Power Trapper does sound like the all singing, all dancing however i do not think we will need such a powerful piece of software, i could be wrong.

Has anyone used the RTI RIP KIT trapper plug-in? We currently use an RTI RIP to produce 1bit Tiffs that is used by our Direct Screen machine, what puts me off this trapping software is that you can not control it much like the way you can with Instant Trapper or Power Trapper, or am i wrong?
 
Michael Jahn - can i say thankyou to you, i will look into your idea, i have never heard of these guys but it looks very interesting.
 
Mark Tonkovich - Many thanks to you also, i now have lots of information to look over and ponder my next move, this is exactly why i posted on this forum to get people with print back grounds to put there inputs in and also for sales people to plug their products towards me, many thanks.
 
 
Also, depending on the intensity and flexibility you need in your trapping ...
you could try trapping with InDesign when creating your print file.
 
another way i used to do it before we had in rip trapping was to place the artwork in indesign, has to be saved as pdf, then print to adobe pdf, turn on in rip separations and application built in trap, works pretty good, costs nothing.
 
Phish said:
I just wanted to say a huge thankyou to all that have read my topic and a bigger thankyou to all that have left a reply also, my search will go on to find the best trapping software out there however my budget does limit me alot to what i can afford. Power Trapper does sound like the all singing, all dancing however i do not think we will need such a powerful piece of software, i could be wrong.

Has anyone used the RTI RIP KIT trapper plug-in? We currently use an RTI RIP to produce 1bit Tiffs that is used by our Direct Screen machine, what puts me off this trapping software is that you can not control it much like the way you can with Instant Trapper or Power Trapper, or am i wrong?
Click to expand...

I think this is a Harelequin Rip so the trapping plug in should be pretty good, ask your supplier for a free trial, you can set the trapping with a plug in for Acrobat (trap zones).
 
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