This article from whattheythink re: Prinergy saga just hit my mailbox at lunch today:

http://members.whattheythink.com/articles/article.cfm?id=41021&p=8732FFB35CB108202F6F5E0EC9230E134CFF5FE8

Being from the great white north, I was disappointed to hear thru the grapevine that they are gutting the Vancouver office, leaving only some marketing types. Apparently they want to concentrate on the consumer and not the commercial market.

The cleaner bumped the connection into the Fuji T9000 (thermal) from the Gateway server and we ended up with very fine lines thru the plate image at regular intervals - you had to use a lupe to see them clearly, but they showed up on press. Had to replate 2 days worth of jobs. We check all connections regularly now.

Are you using any 3rd party software in front of the Epson? We're using exported 1 bit tifs from Nexus (9.1) to an old BestScreen RIP. So far it's been very consistent thru all versions of Nexus that we've had from 7.5 to our present 9.1. Thinking about  upgrading to 9.5 at year-end so it's good to know if there's issues.

We've plugged the freebie (white overprint detector) into CS4 - it works great just like it does CS2 & CS3!

Hey beer - nothing wrong with Harlequin - we used it for years whenoutputting film. Switched to Nexus when we went CTP - everything we dois for the folding carton world. I'm feeling pretty dumb right now as Ihave been overlooking the transparency window settings when saving outan Illy eps. I changed the Preset setting (default medium resolution)by using the custom button. I changed line art and text resolution to1200 ppi and gradient & mesh resolution to 300ppi before saving theeps. The resulting RIP'd file had no stitching. A coupla the fellaswere asking what stitching was so I've attached a screenshot of a"stitched" area on the RIP'd file (Illy default settings) and the samearea on the RIP'd file using the modified Illy settings. My only worrynow is whether upping the gradient & mesh resolution will"condense" the look of any dropshadows or glows - can anybody help outthere?

Sometimes when text or other vector elements are layered with or under a transparent effect, stitching occurs when the postscript is written when using Nexus. It looks like "stairstepping" and can be seen more easily on elements with round arcs. I'm not at work right now but will try to post a screenshot when I'm back on Monday. As far as the appearance pallette, CS4 offers more effects than I can remember. This is the first time I've run into psd files layered one on top of the other with a 100% darken effect used on the top one. What ever happened to just using a simple overprint attribute setting? We've run into more stitching than I think we ever have and most of it can be attributed to the appearance pallette effects that are being used - opacity, darken, blends, blurs. Unfortunately it is intermittent, so we can't predict when it will happen.

Had a CS4 file for a folding carton come in the other day that was extremely complex in use of vector illustrations and used multi-layer transparency ie: a CMY psd file overlayered with a K only psd file with a 100% darken appearance used. We had stitching all over the place when we looked at the RIP'd 1 up file. The only way we could get rid of it was to combine the 2 psd files into 1 - CMYK psd file and to use the good old-fashioned Illy eps rastered in PhotoShop to simplify a lot of the complex vector elements with transparency. It just doesn't seem that top-layering text and or other stitching elements works anymore as designers seem to be making more (irresponsible) use of Illy's appearance pallette. Does anyone else out there have any ideas for getting rid of stitching??

The problems we encountered on the 16 point PPV were probably due to the short runs for the test. On the the concentric test done on PPV substrate there was a "mottled" pattern on the Gracol 7 "gray area" almost as though the ink was emulsifying. I sent all of the test sheets to Mark Samworth for examination and he did come up with a series of PressSync curves to deal with the press gain, but was not completely satisfied that that screening technique would work on that substrate. We did not have any such problem using conventional or UV inks (Hostmann) on 20 pt SBS substrate tests, which all looked great. I would like to try more testing using the Concentric screening on a variety of plastic substrates using the new curves and longer runs, but right now I don't have a budget for it.

Thanks Joe. We were looking for a work-around that would avoid Nexus trapping. What we have found over the years is that pdfs with transparency would import ok, but we were trying to trap using the vector side. The resulting Artpro files would sometimes have thousands of supplementary tifs. Import times could be very lengthy as well. v9 does not seem to do anything differently than previous versions either. Most of our forms are made up of 75 - 224 positions of 6 col pdfs, most using transparency. It's all done seasonally for one client and so far we have muddled thru using Nexus import/trap and imposition using cf2's, but I'm always looking for an easier/faster way of doing things. I'll check out the raster side of things for trapping - thanks for your help. I've read a lot of your posts on the prepressure (b4print) and print planet forums over the years.

We tested it late last year in conjunction with Esko's PressSync technology. Mark Samworth was a great help in getting us set up for the tests. The test prints worked well with conventional & UV inks on normal substrates, but not so well using UV ink on plastic. If I had my way we would have incorporated the new screening and press curve technologies into most of our "normal" work, but then the economy tanked and the company put a moratorium on any new spending. Maybe some day....

I know...I know...Acrobat 7 is old and I have Acrobat 9, but I still prefer 7 for speed and simplicity. My question - I read Joe's explanation of trapping within Acrobat, but I can't seem to get it to work. I can trap a pdf using InDesign, but I would like to trap within Acrobat itself and possibly set up a batch process to do this. At present we have one client that sends 50 - 200 pdfs at a time. We are using Nexus 9.1 to batch trap, but if there is transparency used it slows the process to a crawl. Can someone help me get the settings right in Acrobat 7 to trap a pdf properly? Thanks in advance!

Is there a way of setting up a batch process to trap pdfs - say if you have 50 separate files to trap?