Quark started going downhill when Tom Gill, the developer and co-founder of Quark, left the company. Then the other guy, whose name I forget, made the brilliant move of off-shoring the development work on Quark to India. Now there's a right way to offshore and a wrong way to offshore and this guy apparently wrote the book on doing it the wrong way. So Quark lost control of the code base and there you go, bugarama with no hope of ever getting a handle on fixes.

I wrote up Prinergy 5 and the PDF file editor (with screencaps) here. In my opinion, it's pretty slick and beats Pitstop editor hands down. http://www.prepresspilgrim.com/index.php/archive/editing-pdf-files-with-prinergy-50/

Tech skills: Photoshop and Illustrator. General editing skills.

Other skills: Ability to think independently, high sense of responsibility. Above-average computer skills. That's all you need, although the ability to code PHP is highly desireable.

PPC and affiliate marketing are still relatively new fields, sorta like how electronic prepress was 15 years ago.
Something that is less risky is PPC for local companies, you send them traffic and they pay you per lead.

I worked in prepress until the mid-nineties, then I worked at Creo from 1997-2004. When I left, I decided I would be a contractor/consultant rather than an employee and see how it went.

After about 4.5 years of this, I have done contracts with customers who are printers and non-printer customers, and I haven't lost the house and can afford to pay for repairs on the minivan.

Yeah, the economy sucks but the long term problem is that in printing, wages for people with our skills-set have stagnated for 20 bleepin' years. Generally, printers want to pay half or two thirds of what non-printers want to pay for equivalent computer skills. It's a joke and has been for years.

Yes, if you done prepress all your life it's hard to leave but trust me, a lot of your skills are transferable. Now if you live in a dead zone of the country where all the local industry just blew up, then you need to look at PPC/affiliate marketing which is harder still but doable. I make a little bit of money doing affiliate stuff and I have 3 kids under the age of seven. And there are freakin' kids in India half my age who are making six figures (of course they can put in twenty hour days and I'm lucky to get twenty hours a week).

I'm not saying its easy, it sure wasn't for me and still not a breeze. But in reading this thread, I just want to say thank you for reminding of all those butthead bosses that I had to work for when I was a wage slave.

Turbo FM refers to screening done in hardware, not software. So that Brisque will have a Turbo FM screening board plugged into the back.

Turbo FM is pretty well required with Dolevs if you want nice screens. Don't know about platesetters

Well, if somebody is going to Drupa, it would be great to get snaps of Prinergy5 and then I can post them to my blog.

Or find out if that press release was completely bogus.

cheers, DJ

Yah.. we run both 10.3.9 and 10.4.11 with no problems. The Prinergy workshop is written in java so its not really OS dependent. If you ever have problems with the workshop, it's either the network or the java engine (which gets frequently update via the internet).

It's supposed to work with JDF printers.

http://www.prepresspilgrim.com/index.php/archive/prinergy-50/

Now, has anybody ever seen a JDF printer. Can somebody point me to any links that explain what a JDF printer is and how are suppose to connect to it.

I've been hearing about JDF for about 7 years. Can somebody enlighten me?

thannnnnnnksssss.

Both the Iris 43WIDE and the Agfa Sherpa are OEM'ed branded Mutoh Falcon inkjets. I've set up a scan on my prepress store  to look for Mutoh related stuff. There *seems* to be enough stock floating around to keep you supplied for a little bit of time at least.

Link is on right hand side of www.b4print.com or direct link here: http://www.prepresspilgrim.com/store/Store/43WIDE_Sherpa

Best of luck, DJ

Before I forget yet again....

I've set up an Ebay affiliate store that sell items of interest (platemakers, mac, plotters) to prepress folks. Can somebody at B4Print send me a rate sheet for ads? Does B4Print sell ads or do you guys have some Fairy godmother that sends you money to cover expenses   

Not posting links here as many discussion forums have banned Ebay affiliate postings because of spam issues.

Latest update:

I got some other stuff to try but the operator is making plates so this may take a few days to work out. I'll try to keep everybody posted.

(BTW, if you run the deinstall script on level 4, it does blow away pretty much everything Adobe, including your licensed plug-ins like Enfocus Pitstop. So if you ever get in the same situation as me and start a level 4 deinstall, make sure you've got all license numbers written down somewhere.)

Here at Printcraft we are on the third day of trying to activate our upgrade copy of CS3.

We have installed CS3 on the mac and it accepts the serial number but when we click on the activate button the application just aborts. We have run the special Adobe deinstallation script on level FOUR that blows away all remnants of Adobe software before attempting a reinstall.

We have spent hours on the phone with Adobe tech support and after trying many things, they basically threw up their hands and said we need to reinstall the operating system so that the activation applet could work. The owner of the shop has vetoed that option, as that would mean a least another full day of rebuilding the machine and reinstalling the other applications.

Note that the CS applications run perfectly fine in trial mode, they just abort when you try to activate them.   

I can't believe this is a common occurrence. I mean, I worked in the software development at Creo and I have upgraded entire Prinergy SYSTEMS in less frickin' time then this is taking. If anybody else has run into this weird situation, and got it resolved, please let me know. I'll give you points, I'll give you praise, I'll even give you hugs although I'm a 200+ pounds geeky sysadmins and nobody really enjoys hugging me except for my kids.

But if hugs get the shop out of stinkin' mess, my arms are wide open....

I wrote a post on how to do it and why should do it. But I ask the question, is anybody doing it yet and why not?

http://www.prepresspilgrim.com/index.php/archive/saving-1000s-on-epson-ink-costs-kodak-only/