Altered States: New Challenges Presented by Digital Workflow

Just a bit over a decade ago, the landscape of the global printing industry was irrevocably altered, thanks to the advent of computer-to-plate (CTP) manufacturing technologies and digital production printing.  Once considered an enduring landmark in the industry, film has since been replaced with digital files.  The change promised new efficiencies for printers and their customers, as well as the potential for considerable cost and time savings.

But as with most paradigm shifts, this fundamental change in the way printers do business also instigated new workflow challenges:  Upon which digital file formats should the workflow be based? Who will create these final-exchange-formatted files? And who will be responsible for making sure they’ve been properly created, ensuring the digital content flows through the prepress and output phases of production without delay or mishap?

For awhile, these responsibilities fell heavily on printers’ shoulders, who were — let’s face it — happy to get any digital files from their customers, no matter the format or state of disarray.  But the mindset is different these days.  Unless prepress services are a critical part of their business model, printers would greatly prefer to receive ‘prepress-ready’ digital content files from their clients.  And the good news is that their customers can easily be educated and equipped to provide them.

Jon Osborne is the digital prepress manager at Peeples Printing, Gainesville, Georgia.  His responsibilities include everything from design and file preparation to imposition digital proofing, Photoshop editing, and quality-controlling digital files.  While film still plays a minor role at Peeples, according to Osborne, ‘Nearly 100 percent of all the jobs we now produce are from files sumbmitted by the customer, or retrieved from our digital archives.  We have abandoned the conventional film-to-plate workflow that was in place prior to our transition to CTP.’

Approximately one-third of the customer supplied files arrive via Peeples’ FTP (File Transfer Protocol) service, with the balance coming in on some form of removable media.  And the types of files Osborne receives vary greatly.

Peeples Printing provides its customers with guidancce on how best to create their digital content files, whether they’re native application files or PDFs, according to Osborne. ‘We provide guidelines for customers to produce PDFs, if that is their choice in furnishing files.  Our preference is to use [PDFs]…but to also have access to the files that authored the PDF,’ he suggests.  ‘The editing tools for PDF are still somewhat limited and unwieldy, but certainly powerful as compared to just a couple of years ago.’

The wide range of applications at the customers’ disposal is cause enough for problems int he workflow, but complicate that with a varying degree of customer print knowledge and many printers find that they have a real mess on their hands. Many printers report as much as 80 to 90 percent ofthe digital files they receive from clients are problematic.

This isn’t the case for Peeples, Osborne suggests: ‘I would say that 75 to 80 percent of the files we receive from our regular customers are sumitted with little no problems. The occasional missing font, or special need may arise, but it’s certainly obvious that working with the customer, over time, to address preflighting issues offers the playoff of [receiving] nearly perfect, production-worthy files on a consistent basis.’

The goal, he agrees, is to educate the customer about why it’s so critical to create digital files correctly. They don’t need to understand the complexities of digital prepress, but they should develop a basic understanding of simple printing principles, such as resolution, color space, font issues, etc.

Besides education, it’s also important to help equip the customer with the tools it needs to produce good files. ‘Preflight software and training of staff are our best defenses, early on in the workflow, to identify problems with sumbitted files,’ Osborne notes. ‘We prefer [Markzware’s} FlightCheck and encourage customers to purchase this, as well. We offer to assist them in its use until they reach a level of comfort and expertise that ensures good file prep each time they package a job for the printer.’

FlightCheck Professional ‘looks inside’ digital files (in a variety of formats, including native application files, PDFs and standards-based print files like PDF/X-1a and analyzes whether the file has been properly created according to its output intentions.