It's been forever since I have last posted here, been very busy thankfully...

Anyway, here is my question, in Nexus (9.5. what is the difference between the PressLink vs CIP3 activity, I have read up on what the manual has to say about them, but really I don't see much that is all too different, they both seem to do the same thing, export CIP3 data for press control systems.

Does anyone here run either of the two to export ink key data etc??? and, if so which one and why did you choose one over the other? also should I upgrade the server to Nexus 10x vs the older 9.5.8 or does it even matter, any difference between the activities in 10x?

This is why I ask and my situation, we are in the process of installing a Heidelberg SpeedMaster CD74 6/c on the floor to replace a very old 5/c press, it's not here as of yet, but my "higher ups" have finally started to embrace the concept that technology is a good thing. So I really want all my ducks in a row to show them it does improve the "process" and want a pretty smooth transition.

We don't as of yet have a license for the PressLink module, but if it's the way to go vs the CIP3 module, then I don't see any problems talking them into getting it. I understand what the data is and used for (ink density etc) for the control system on the press, so my other question is, do you have your press(s) connected via the network or do you transfer the data via flash memory???

I may have other questions as I go along w/ setting up the workflow side that I have not yet thought of. I also would like to hear from others who have used or are using CIP3 data and how it is going for you, irregardless of the workflow mfg you use.

Sorry for the long winded post and many thanks for any thoughts or input on this.
.......
EW

OK Nexus, ArtPro & PowerLayout gurus...

I have a dilemma, we are currently getting files from clients that are gangs for the most part, we impose in ArtPro/PowerLayout, then off to the Nexus box to get screened and exposed to our platesetter as 1-bit tiffs. Then run & die cut.

Here in lies the problem, lately we have been getting pre-screened files in, this causes us a few problems, especially if the screened job is ganged up w/ a non-screened job, we have to send it through the rip to get screened so the one already w/ screens looks like shit on press. So what do you guys do when you get pre-screened jobs in, even when you run all pre-screened jobs and when you have to combo the jobs w/ un-screened artwork???

This issue has been driving me nuts the past few weeks and I have yet to find a good answer/solution and the looks of the jobs coming off press could lose us business.

Any ideas, thoughts, workarounds, etc that any of you know about????

Gracious thanks for any help.......
EW

OK, here is my dilemma, I have an older slim-line rack server that has been doing absolutely nothing for over a year but consume power. We used to use it as a mail server, but fazed it out and shifted the mail to another much more powerful server.

Now, my thinking is, since management is so cheap and will try to get every last drop of blood from equipment (I am typing this on a 9 yo G4 Mac), they sure as hell won't give/donate it way, that means we have something that actually could perform some task(s) other than take up a rack slot.

Now, anybody have suggestions for what this huge doorstop could be used for???

The most traditional uses for dx'd servers, like
DNS/DHCP, we have two old servers for redundancy for this.
NAS, we have two separate boxes doing various backup tasks, like color profiles from equipment, custom configs of prepress equip. etc. on one, the other does a non essential server config backup every other night.
DATA BACKUP, we have robotic LTO tape drives and AIT2 tape drives backing up all data on a rotational scheme.
FTP, we have a pretty supped up old server, it used to drive all of our bloated super-slow presstek rip software before we fazed it out, now we have one pretty sweet mirrored ftp server w/ huge capacity.
DATABASES, again we have 3 different servers running 3 different SQL databases and one is used very little.
FIREWALL, we have Cisco hardware firewalls installed so no need for a software based firewall, and the hardware ones suck to manage too, I just learned this when I was handed the IT workload.
PRINT SERVER, we have two servers setup to que jobs to different dept. printers.

Sure would hate to see something we payed a shit load for do nothing.

Thanks.....

EW

We have been looking at upgrading our impo software, currently looking at Metrix vs upgrading our Preps to v.6, does anybody have experience in both, like coming from a Metrix system to the new Preps 6 software??? Which does better/quicker in flat/sig production?? Preps seems to have taken alot of ideas from the Metrix side for the new version they have.

Also, anybody who has upgraded from Preps 5x to 6, how did the transition go, and did you have any problems training, production issues, etc.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated, we are just trying to figure out which one will be less painful and cause the least downtime, since there is really only two of us doing 4 different job positions and a lot of presses to feed. Thanks........

EW

Anybody running Odystar 4.0.1??? If so, have you had any issues w/ gateways stalling after being idle for a period of time.

EW

We are looking into getting DotSpy in the coming months, wanted to know from any users what they like and dislike about the software, also if anybody is using it with presstek files.

Thanks in advance for any info...

Had a flaky pdf file submitted for print this past week, the job had 5 four color sigs and around 10 black sigs, they had a few images as cmyk mixed in with the grays on the black sigs and some cmyk gray pics on a few of the four color sigs. So I kick the job out, told the salesman to get the InDesign CS2 file from the client and we could fix all in about 15 mins. Of course the client refused to send in the native files and wanted us to fix the problems in the pdf.

So, now it's back to me and I have to figure out how much time to fix all the problems in the pdf file, I come up with a figure, they contact the client and of course they balk at the time and price and refuse to pay for the extra plates to run as is. They "proceed to fix the file themselves"  they did fix the images for the most part, only had a few left as cmyk gray images, but the new pdf file they sent in now had the text separate out as four color, strange I thought, since the first time was all right, the text came out as black.

This gets me to my issue (sorry for going on and on) I then open up the pdf file in Neo 1.2.2 and check the text & line fills, all the the black sigs came in as having cmyk color resources, so I select both some text and also a few lines, the fill colors showed as k.o. for C, k.o. for M, k.o. for Y and 100 for K, I have never seen this ever in any of the pdf files submitted to us, I took a screen cap of a sample of the text in Neo.

Anybody ever seen this before in a submitted pdf file???? And, if so, what did your client do to get it to screw up in this way.

Yes, I did check if the text was set as registration and also a rich black, the file text used the default black in InDesign CS2, that is what the client is tell us.