We have two and I took over for a guy and have a question regarding paper profiles and alignment profiles. Do you guys keep profiles for every single paper type (Gloss, Matte, Uncoated, etc), paper size (13x19, 12x18, 8.5x11, etc), paper weight (104gsm, 216gsm, 270gsm, etc)?

I'd like to clean this up and simplify our digital department, but it's looking a bit daunting.

Thanks!

P.S. Long time since I've been here. I've been in the digital press department for a year or so now and I'm the only one here. Good to see B4Print is still up and running.

We're a little slow at the shop at the moment and I figured now would be a good time to do some cleanup on our XMF stripping templates and such and thought of this.

Out of curiosity, how do you guys have your presses setup in ColorPath Organizer? We have our various presses, then one linear media profile and one calibrated to g7 media profile.

I'm seeing auto creep in XMF is based on the media type, so the only way to do that is have additional media profiles correct? Is auto creep worth it? We've been doing manual creep for years (about 10 now) and I'm noticing it doesn't creep enough and that initial creep if the cover is on a different press and paper thickness moves everything way too much. Its not behaving as I would think it should.

Another question I have is in regards to plate/press setup. We have three sizes of the same plates 1030x800 0.3, 1030x790 0.3 and 737x600 0.3. Currently we have them set up as their own plate workflow item templates and I have seen that you can have your press drive what plate is selected (or narrowed down) by having the Press Profile Controls Press Geometry, however with this checked, nothing actually changes. I've tried telling it in the press profile the dimensions of plate on the right hand side of the window which match the left hand side for press specs, and match the sizes on our Luxel Javelin CTP, but if that right hand side has anything in there, nothing is selected and the plate dropdown is grayed out.

Generally, what happens in our shop is that a job will get setup one way, then paper/estimating will come back after a job has been proofed out and approved and tell us they're moving it to another press. When changing our press icon to a different press and same for the plate icon it removes our imposition and we have to start over. Anyway around that?

Thanks!
Aaron

Hey guys, we were watching a demo today on XMF Pressready and our demo gal was also answering some questions on XMF when I noticed regardless of what press she was setting up for, her plate icon didn't change but her plate info did.

Right now, we have separate plate icons for the different presses as well as matching press icons. The plate icon if we have to change presses for whatever reason, paper or scheduling, we have to reimpose or save as template. This seems cumbersome. I tried toying around with it after the demo but changing the press, doesn't change the plate media on the plate icon. Is there a way to get that to change along with the press?

Thanks!

Hey guys, I'm wondering if anyone has run across this before... Our Light Light Black isn't being recognized as installed. The empty cartridge is recognized if we put it back in. Fuji gave us a replacement cartridge that we got this morning and still no go. When the door is open it sees the cartridge as full, but once the door is closed and it has a moment to make some noise, then it says there is no ink cartridge installed.

Epson's site isn't helpful, they just say to re-seat cartridges and turn off the machine and turn it back on. We've tried that on both new cartridges and nothing's working.

Edit: the Epson in question is a SC-P8000.

Is this possible? I've got a Canva PDF that has a cmyk build that they would like a Xerox Specialty Ink color mixed with to produce a custom orange. Unfortunately some of the art is raster so I have no idea how to fix this completely.

Hey guys, all three of our iMacs here got an update to Catalina in the last day or so. Ever since, our computers are incredibly slow to open any programs or files for the first several (15-30 minutes) of running, then will operate as normal, then run incredibly slow again for no apparent reason. Nothing shows up in Activity Monitor, but it can seriously take several minutes to open acrobat, or XMF or anything. The little dock icon will bounce forever.

Any idea what could have happened? Restarts/full shutdowns don't seem to get rid of it.

Hey so my pressman on our larger Komori 640 is having a weird issue in his KMS computer. KMS thinks he has a job called NON with no CIP data at all. He can't delete it either. I thought I'd poke around his C: Drive and see if I could find this empty job and delete it from Explorer and I can't find it anywhere.

This doesn't necessarily affect his ability to run his press and it is grabbing new files from our CIP computer so its just odd.

Thanks guys!

Does anyone know where I can find a full installer for Photoshop CS5.1? I have the disks for Design Suite Premium for 5.5 but don't have a cd drive in either of my computers. I just bought a Surface Pro 7 a couple months ago and have since learned that I can't download old installers anymore through Adobe. I also don't have the serial number on my account because its a physical copy I got from work (we were going to throw it out).

I'd rather not have to buy a CD drive if I don't have to. I'm probably out of luck huh?

Has anyone given this one a try? It looks like a nice free font management tool.

I haven't played around with it too much but there were some fonts I couldn't add from our external HDDs not sure if that was something wrong with their encoding or what not, a lot of our fonts give errors if dropped into Font Book so not sure if that could have been it. Helvetica CE Narrow was the font family we were having issues getting dropped into Font Base.

Here's a link if you guys want to check it out.

https://fontba.se

Hey guys, I'm digging into my PDF post flight action list since it does weird things with outlined fonts and we get questions all the time about it. I wasn't here when XMF was setup so I don't know where this action list came from exactly, except that it does say the authors name and Fujifilm in the metadata. It is called "PDF Proof Postflight.ppp".

Anyway, when we do buyouts for other printers and get pdf proofs from them, they're always small enough to email and are rasterized, no idea what resolution they are off hand but they're almost always 3MB and smaller. Anyone have an idea how to do that with a Pistop Preflight Profile?

What do you guys do for PDF proofs?

Here's a dropbox link to our profile: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fd6oh04bd9wipvw/PDF%20Proof%20Postflight.ppp?dl=0

Hey guys,

Quick question, but what settings on the Epson 9900 should I use to print on HP Coated 90gsm paper. I'm trying to get it color managed with XMF ColorPath Sync but am having no luck getting my max delta E down from 16 and the 95% down from 8. I'm both trying to get it into G7 specs and reducing the amount of ink pooling and it is getting better 3 iterations in, but I just can't get that down.

I am using Photo Black and have tried it on the Epson Singleweight Matte preset and the Semi Matte 260 preset (That's what the Fuji techs had it set to run from Oris, but thats our high end proofing paper and is way thicker). We just bought a SureColor P8000 and had it installed and calibrated mid-late February and now I'm trying to move our older epson over to XMF from Oris for ease of use and trying to actually get the thing color managed/accurate - it never was "accurate" on Oris.

Thanks!

So, I've had Mojave since July. It hasn't been bad. I've liked it so far. I got a batch of updates a few weeks ago and now I get the beach ball/color wheel thingy all the time. Copying an empty file? Beach ball. Open a file? Beach ball. Rename a file? Beach ball.

I couldn't stand it so convinced the owner to buy me more ram. I now have 32GB of DDR4 ram and am still getting the beach balls of doom for seriously anything and everything on my computer. Opening pallets in adobe programs, changing tools in pitstop, opening files (possibly unrelated, but I sometimes have to double click on a file multiple times to get it to open once), dragging a file into XMF, changing file location in finder, doing anything in finder. I don't get it. Restarts do nothing. Onyx does nothing. I have 34 fonts installed so that can't be it. My trash has 50 GB in it, but it's holding files I am not completely sure I want to delete just yet - I set it to delete after 30 days.

I have no idea why this is happening. Disk Utility First Aid says my hard drive is OK.

Hey guys,

I'm getting an interesting issue. For some reason, some of my fonts on the SMB share in InDesign's Document Fonts folder are showing up as Zero Bytes after copying over to it.

On the Desktop, they show as having actual file sizes. Unfortunately the way we have to work here at the shop is on the network, because if I have to do any changes to it, I have to copy back from the server which still produces Zero Byte font files on my desktop.

Any idea why my fonts would show up as Zero Bytes and then of course not work?

Thanks,
Aaron

Hey guys,

I'm looking at trying to figure out a new file server system. Right now we have a LaCie 5Big NAS Pro 10 TB (6 TB usable in RAID). It gets backed up to a duplicate 5Big NAS Pro nightly (mirrored backup). It also gets copied to Code42's Crash Plan for small business. Since it's a NAS device running it's own software and trying to monkey around with it, I get the feeling it was more for home storage or small one man shops without a complicated user directory and multiple share points. Granted it says it can handle 200 users and multiple shares, computers don't typically like to connect to both share points at the same time (we only have two shares on it - office and prepress).

Anyway, the backup NAS has started to show failure in the actual device, not the storage and won't wake up on a schedule. I have to turn it on manually. The main NAS has had several HDD's fail and replaced already.

What are some simple but effective storage solutions you guys have at your shops? I'm trying to put together a plan to present to the owners.

My initial thought, is use an existing 2014 model Mac mini, have one raid storage unit attached to it via usb and a duplicate raid storage unit also attached via usb for backups, then crash plan the main unit. Then have the Mac handle the network sharing and user management.

Thoughts?

Hey guys,

we're running into a strange issue where our RGB conversion is generating ink densities way higher than 320%. I thought we could maybe fix it if we were able to somehow add the Ink TAC reduction for GRACoL 320% from Pitstop to our existing preflight profile. I didn't work here yet when the XMF rip was installed and have no real idea what happens in our preflight profile.

Thanks!
Aaron

Hey guys! I'm back to work now (I got two weeks off), after my daughter was born. She was born on the 6th at 6lbs 3oz. She's super cute!

The hospital stay was longer than normal, at 4 days. Normally they're 24 hours after baby is born, but she had some wobbly blood sugar levels and high risk jaundice levels, so we had to stay longer to make sure her blood sugar stabilized and her jaundice levels started to drop. She had to stay under a light for a couple days, though thankfully in our room.

She has a small heart defect, a VSD or Ventricle Septal Defect, which is a 3-4mm hole in the wall between her right and left ventricles and the cardiologist is monitoring her with a series of ultrasounds to keep tabs on it and see if it heals on its own or if they need to do surgery later. Prayers would be appreciated.

So far life with a newborn is fun, exciting, new and very tiring. The little to no sleep thing is not fictional. I was optimistically hoping it was like a big fish story, you know, everyone has to have the worst whatever experiences. It's not.

I'll try to upload a picture of her if I can figure that out.

Hey guys, so since my old font management software doesn't work in Mojave, I've decided to make a custom icon set for the font folder, ~/Library/Fonts. I thought you guys might like it too.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2rrmuups451x2cc/FontFolderIcon.icns?dl=0

Just drag it to the tiny icon when in the Get Info window of the Fonts folder.

Hey guys, I just got a letter in the mail from Fuji saying to hold off on updating to Catalina. Apparently Catalina will no longer support 32 bit applications and XMF will not run on Catalina. They did say however that a future update will move the XMF Client app to 64 bit, though not exactly when that would be happening.

Hey all,

I'm trying to convert these two post script fonts to either OTF or TTF. They keep failing on every online converter I've found, even the one stickied here.

The fonts are Franklin Book and Franklin Demi.

Any idea why that may be?

Hey guys, I'm hoping one of you can help with this.

We stopped using AFP a while ago... June maybe? Yep June. Anyway, Within the last week, we've been experiencing issues with the SMB share. Finder windows aren't refreshing their contents anymore. Files that have been deleted on one workstation are still showing up on the other (Yet don't open if double clicked). Compressed files of any sort can no longer be un-compressed on the SMB share. They have to be done on the desktop. Excel files have to be worked on from the desktop as they will sometimes randomly delete themselves upon saving - this is a huge issue for us until our shop switches to the MIS system... Seriously we've been doing cost sheets and everything from Excel documents for decades - 2 of them I think. Another issue is that Illustrator (mostly) warns that files have been modified outside of illustrator upon saving a file.

Anyone have any idea how to fix any of this?