Quote from: Joe on March 21, 2020, 11:02:31 AM


Ummmmm...what?

ummmm...

it's my english, sorry.

I'll try again.

Working from home means LESS money.-
- for the average joe* -

Thats because now, you get paid for the time you work IN the shop.

When you work from home, you'll start working all day, and you will be expected to answer the call, or reply to that mail any time of the day.

It doesn't starts like that, but that's where ends.

How much will you charge for that?

And how can you negotiate when out there good job opportunities are so few - and becoming fewer -

You might get even less money, cause you might be laid off and then ''offered'' the chanse to work from home, with less money than your current wage.

That's the economical part of the equation.

There are -and there will be more - consequences on social life and society from ''working from home'' model, sorry i don't have the time to write an essay about them.

I see people takin it lightly - the work from home trend -, and i'm a little bit worried about it.



*There are of-course people who working from home can make more money, but i rarely see that kind of people in prepress deparments.

The virus crisis will end one way or the other, but the world will not be the same again.

It won't be the same even if the fed out there in the states or the central bank here in europe starts raining money ( which they will, but it can't and won't be enough ).

But let's be optimistic and say that in june economy will be back to december's '19 state, or lets smoke a joint and imagine that in june economy will be back to 2000, printing is getting bigger and bigger and we get a fat raise every year, or we move to the next shop.

Even with that scenario, the world as we know it will be completely different in a couple 
of months.

Most of us here are middle aged people making our living out of an ever shrinking trade.

So, i wouldn't say no to working from home to keep my job, but i'm really skeptical were this leads - in both economical and social ways.
- it won't be for our best interest -

There is 90% drop here, most of the people got sent home for a couple of weeks, and that's just the beginning.
Phones almost stopped ringing, we are prrinting /binding previous week's last orders and Monday morning we'll be looking at each other - or do some cleaning -

Still i don't like working from home.

I've done it once i hurt my leg and it went all wrong - and i'm not talking about job mistakes -

I don't like messing work with family, getting job calls when i'm playin with the kids or jammin with friends, or when i'm doing my own stuff.

It's not that i won't answer or help, but i like getting paid when i'm working and till now i never got paid right offering my services out of the shop.

I'm afraid though that's this is were things are going - with or without viruses - and and don't like the way western society's will evolve in the near future...

Not really sure, but the way i see it is not paper simulation problem - or i don't see ''that'' button-.

Our konica presses are supposed to point the fogra standard, and sometimes they actually achieve that, eyeballing the prints next to my colorbook.

To be honest, i think that all of this presses are extremely sensitive to humidity and temperature changes, but even if you provide them, they still have problems on multiple issues, paper handling, color etc.

So, i'd like to hear if anyone works in a shop with steady - and proper - humidity and temperature, is printing without any major issues ( color, paper etc ) with these models, or that they suck wherever you put them ( as i believe, but can't tell the techs now the way our printing room is ).

There is a spectro in the shop, and we calibrate the presses daily.

But that's calibration, not color management i suppose.

So after calibrating if you print the same file on both presses, sometimes match, others may be a little bit different, and sometimes may not be close to each other at all...

But the biggest problem is that even if the prints match between the presses, we are not sure about the colour accuracy.
We tell the press to bypass the profile of the pdf ( when there are any ) and respect the CMYK values only.
And there is a yellowish hue on the print.

We can't use the spectro to calculate the color shift, it's dedicated to the press and we can only measure a build in press chart for the daily calibraton.
- we don't actually have access to the spectro readings, we print the chart in the morning, read it and the press updates it's profile -

That's as far as it concerns the two konicas.

With the igen - when it comes to color - things are a little bit better.

We also run every morning a color check routine, the prints are closer to a fogra color chart, but we can't check the accuracy either, sometimes the shadows are blocked, other times color shifts during the press run...

Like i said the conditions of the pressroom are not the best, there is a lot of dust, even though we try to keep it as clean as possible, and humidity/temperature cannot be steady.
-The plant is 6 meters tall, with 3 meter wood ''walls'' to separate deparments,bindery, offset, digital and management/sales offices -

As i wrote, management won't take any measures in the near future - apart from cutting down personnel... -
But i'm not really sure either that if the conditions were excellent the presses would operate right .
( judging from the one i used in a clean, closed, air conditioned  room a couple of years ago )

The client hard copy approval is rare an option, as we run 10 to 20 different jobs a day, many of them delivered same day or a couple of days later.

Maybe now we slowed down ( almost stopped ) because of the virus crisis, we'll find the time to deal with it.

 The last 10 months i'm running the production in a middle sized plant, a 5 color KBA, bindery for saddlestiched jobs, two konica's c6085 and an igen4 digital presses ( and a couple of other's post press finishing machines ).


I'm facing a lot of problems with the digital printing ''presses''.


Till now my experience with digital printing was a bizhub 7000, when it was working, which when it worked it rarely printed good, and two label printing indigo's ( excellent machines ).

The excuse the tech's tried to use for the printing quality of the bizhub was the printing room temperature, humidity and dust collection. 

Unfortunately for them, all of the above were not an excuse since the printing room was the same with the ctp, and it was clean with steady temperature and humidity conditions.

No solution was found, till i left the shop and went to the label manufacturer with the indigo's.

Now i'm facing the same problems with the c6085's and the igen (4).

The ''presses'' break down all the time, i'm sure that they are down more hours the day than the hours they print.

But unfortunately for me now, i don't control the conditions of the printing room the digital presses are in, and the tech's put the blame on the dust and temperature/humidity factors ( which are not stable and for the near future the owner can't and won't do anything about it...)


Apart from all the hours the machines are down, i have a serious problem with color reproduction.

If i print the same file on the 3 machines, i'll get 3 different products ( color speaking ).
- Maybe more come to think of it in some cases, as color may shift during the run -

I don't want to color manage anything.

I want the machines to read only the CMYK values of the files, and reproduce them according to the FOGRA39 standard.

To achieve this, techs told us that we should use the ''bypass conversion'' adjustment on job color settings, but then color comes out with a shitty yellowish hue all over the sheet.
So we use the built in color manage profiles and eyeball the print in comparison to our cheap secretary screens before we run the job... 
- thats on the two konica's-



The igen can't print on plain stocks below 100gr and we never know beforehand if a 100gr or 120gr plain stock will be printed so we test it first and then cut the paper to it's final size...

Even then, if it is a big run it might start well and after 200-500 sheets the press won't process the stock - sometimes - 

Color is not stable either, even though every morning we run the calibrating procedure....

Two questions:

A) What do you think about the color reproduction of the konica's?
Does anyone here print's on these machines and how you handle color reproduction?

B) What stocks your igen4 won't handle well ( or at all ) ?

ps I left the best part last.

There's no actual proofer on the shop.

Clients sign the digital prints, and then the offset guys try to mach them on the KBA - if it's an offset oriented job -

- Blood is red unless your grandma is Q Elizabeth or that blonde Lanister who was doing her brother. -

We called that brown stuff here ''apdec'' or ''updec'', never seen a black one.
( never seen that written either, it was always in a chopped water bottle, and i was pretty sure it was self reproducting at nights like a fungus or something ).

Sorry to hear that, a lot of people got a lot of help from Matt.
He will be missed...

Didn't know about canvas, but usually this kind of pdf's ( photoshop, corel, word etc ) have that certain feel that needs (cries for ) a second look.
- Even though prinect's normalizer did a pretty good job with most of them -

He was complicated but interesting, i 'm kindly asking for an unbanning so he can hold his thesis against any potential negative to him thesis and encourage other people to state their thesis in a meaningful and less harmful to the eyes way.

I'll download it just in case, but most probably will only run on DC - which does the job most of the times -
If you have X - i do in work - you wont do much!

It wasn't the excel export but the ''character set'' option inside vdp editor....

Thank you all anyway!

I've tried saving as utf with no luck, i'll give a try to david's setting ( hoping that is not already set this way )

I don't see any preferences of this tool inside acrobat, and i didn't find a general acrobat setting for imported text endoding....

Heidelberg's vdp editor only accepts csv files, but maybe i could save a unicode txt and change it to csv...

Hi all,

I runned into a serious problem.

If my excel-csv file contains english characters everything works fine.

When i try to make a vdp file with greek characters i get ''chinese'' instead.

I don't even know were to start from.

I thought that character encoding is standard unicode for all software lately and problems like this were over, but that's not the case.

Any kind of help would be appreciated, thanks in advance!   

If it's the first time you're smiling since you returned, i wish you to stay here from some other shop!

Either way, welcome!