New development here, everyone claims they didn't change any settings. Plate jobs will sit in the Evo queue unless they're set to Urgent. How lame.

We've taken the big step in getting GMC Inspire for VDP. It's very powerful and complicated, and in general the more I learn the more I like it vs. XMPie. HOWEVER - and this is a big one - the imposition is not usable whatsoever.

I complained about it and found a fairly good custom scripted workflow that one of their support engineers wrote and posted in their forums, but it requires manual intervention for each job in a way that leaves a lot of room for error.

Their development team has recognized that the impo really fails in a big way and have generously agreed to tackle the job of improving it for release in a future update to their Designer program. They've asked me to help them, as a printing professional with years of impo experience.

They're engineers and programmers, and not printing people, so this really is a bit of a challenge - I need to teach them what makes for a usable imposition, and really describe in minute detail what does what, and why. Also need to account for different scenarios.

Anyone got any good resources that describe in general terms what marks and impo are? I've made a good start at terminology, but want to avoid writing a book that's already been written.

I am frequently running into this issue when doing variable data jobs.

Why the hell does OS X not speak standard ascii codes? I link to data that say for example has a "™" in it, which in ascii is 0153. The mac sees it as "ô" and that's what renders on my variable job. I can do a find and replace in the xmpie code to look for "ô" and replace with "™" but obviously this is not great.

What I'd like is some sort of extension or library for the mac so that it would speak the common lingo of every other OS out there. Any ideas that don't include finding and replacing at some point in the process?

cute chick with FSM info you need to know now.

USPS 2013 FSM Guidelines: A Crash Course

Anyone have Quark2Id plugin that would be willing to convert a catalog for us? Just checking in case we go that route instead of dining on the vomit of last year's (and the several years preceding) Quack nightmare. Trying to get some excel we can suck into indy using Grep styles to redo this massive price list.

Our mailing god sent me this, if you do mailings or design pieces for mail this is a very good explanation of the recent changes that went into effect 1/5/2013.

http://www.slideshare.net/pitneybowes/folded-self-mailer-changes-what-you-need-to-know

The manual says the fonts are included on the install cd, I have no idea where that might be now.
I need the XM128.ttf and variants, if you can fish those out for me that would be super awesome, we have a 857,000 piece mailing job that I need to print coupon codes on and was being told "just use the code 128 font" - which won't work because it needs check digits calculated in order for it to scan and I'm hoping xmpie will do that for me given the right font.

Need experienced (5+ years) operator. Must know Preps 6 hopefully including using JDF folding patterns, and have above average Pitstop skills. Of course, need to know Creative Suite, Quark, et cetera. No hacks, blood sausages, or trainees please. It's a small department so no room for BS.

Preference given to those with the above, plus packaging and VDP experience. We use XMPie.

Late 1st shift hours ideally 10-6 m-f, full time, Blue Cross, vacation, 401k. Smallish company with a diverse account base. We do web to print, mailings and personalized variable work, packaging, business stationery, envelopes for conversion. We run Prinergy Evo and have fairly new equipment in prepress (12 core Mac Pros with dual 24" monitors).

Southwest Chicago suburbs, near intersection of I294 and I55

Contact me via PM here. We're interviewing starting next week and hiring ASAP. I will be doing some of the interviewing but only can make recommendations. I will forward all resumes to the decision makers though.

We need to insert a blank page after every 3rd page in a pdf, or sometimes every 4th page, anyone know a way?

so it seems cropmarks are just not working on 6.2.1, of course I plated a lot of jobs before noticing this one 

anyone else do wat

Ok so this is an old problem but a new one for us.

We have a NAS (actually 2), formatted NTFS. If I copy type 1 fonts from the NAS to my desktop, the fonts are fine.

When I copy them back to the NAS they are 0k and broken.

I can unzip them on the NAS with my mac and they're fine.

copy them from folder to folder or the NAS, they're broken.

MOVING them does not break them.

copying via terminal breaks them.

We did not have this problem until we tried to eliminate AdmitMac from the macs, we're trying to get rid of it for other reasons.

In theory this should just work fine, NTFS supports resource forks.

We do not want to nor is it even remotely reasonable to turn on the Apple Double stuff (turning off ntfs streams) because it makes 2 files for every file and we have way too many files live on the nas to even consider that, plus it would likely break everything.

We do not want to use a 3rd party software.

Here's the ad they're running, or at least the draft I got:

Printing: Prepress Production Coordinator

Commercial printer in South/Southwest Suburbs seeks experienced Prepress Production Coordinator. This is a hybrid coordinator/operator position. This is a full-time, first shift, salaried position with a competitive salary and full benefits.

Job responsibilities include, but are not limited, to the following:
Preflight incoming jobs
Schedule work and assign work to prepress operators
Check outgoing prepress work
Interface with Sales, Customer Service, Clients, and employees in other departments
Ensure that prepress supply inventory is adequate
Ensure that equipment is maintained
Work on jobs as necessary

REQUIRED experience and skills
Minimum TEN YEARS experience working for a commercial printer (not a quick printer)
Minimum FIVE YEARS supervisory experience in prepress: including scheduling employees and work, interfacing with sales, customer service, and shop-floor production.
Expertise in all industry-standard graphics applications on Mac and Windows
Thorough knowledge of entire printing process from prepress to bindery
Minimum TWO YEARS preps experience

OTHER experience and skills (not required but an asset)
Prinergy
Digital Print
Variable Data Print setup
Mailing

Please send resume and salary history. Candidates not meeting all REQUIRED criteria will not be considered. Candidates who do not submit a salary history will not be considered.


Contact me and I'll put your resume in front of the person who is doing the hiring.

Trillian users experiencing packaging issues, please email them with your concerns. I and my coworker are going to tell them that their tape sucks and the slip sheets don't eject reliably. Just had another slip sheet make it into the Magnus, I suspect it is from gummy residue from the tape they use.

Attached is a copy of the letter that was included in our last skid of plates, explaining why they're using tape and asking for feedback on their packaging.

So we're trying to get this new printer driven by Prinergy and it prints weird garbage. Anyone have any tips for driving this HP 510 directly via Prinergy? It takes HP RTL. Should be able to set it up as a windows printer and print to it from Prinergy, in theory. That's how we're driving a couple Xeroxes.

Picked up an Ihara R720 Color Reflection Densitometer on the cheap and didn't get the calibration target card, anyone got one laying around they want to unload for cheap/free? It'll have c-m-y-k-z swatches with the density values printed on the card. Any T-Ref card will do.

Also it's for sale if anyone needs one. $200 will do it, without the reference card but with the book, charger, and case.

Started a new topic so ppl could find it - re my post in another topic where we have a nested (overlapping pages) layout and whatever edges overlapped would set the bleed to 0 automagically, thereby ruining the layout.

"We've added an option to Preps 6.1.1. allows you to revert page bleed handling to behave similar as in Preps 5.3.3 and earlier through the profile setting -AUTOBLEED:NO. Have you adjusted Preps Profiles in the past? Preps Profiles are located on your local Mac/PC client within the Preps Application folder.

Browse to your Preps Applications Folder > Profiles and then open the Default profile (ie: Default.cfg) within a Text Editor. Scroll down to -AUTOBLEED: and adjust YES to NO. Save the profile and start Preps. "

I added:
If you have saved a custom preferences file (xxx.cfg) the line -AUTOBLEED:YES will not be in there, just add it and make it -AUTOBLEED:NO.
Works great.

Ok, so in short I've sent this to Kodak:


***
We are trying to come up with a system to move to Preps 6 entirely.
Our situation is that we have many thousands of existing Preps 5 templates.

In particular we have a number of templates that have up to 1300 individual signatures inside the .tpl file.

We use these templates as a library for standing layouts, for envelope conversion jobs. These must be used and repeated exactly as they are, recreating them for each job is not an option.

What we would like to do is to be able to ADD to this repository, WITHOUT having to go back to Preps 5 each time we get a new layout.

Since Preps 6 does not allow multi-signature "Templates", my solution to our need to retain existing layouts and going forward ADD to our current library, using Preps 6, is as follows:

1. Split the multi-signature "Templates" files we have now into individual .tpl files, each signature as it's own .tpl file, naming the .tpl files based on the value of the "%SSiSignature" field in the code of the .tpl file.

2. Save these files in a folder within the Preps Templates folder, named appropriately, say for example /Templates/Diamond Envelope/

3. When adding new layouts, we create them in Preps 6 and save as a 1 signature template, named appropriately, within the aforementioned folder

I would like some assistance with step 1 above, or if there are other suggestions that you can offer to help us transition fully to Preps 6 while maintaining our library of templates.

Thank you.

****

So what I'm hoping for here is that one of you data or scripting geniuses can give me some help with step 1 - basically I need to take a .tpl file, search between  the blocks of text starting with "%SSiSignature:", save out individual files named by the value in red here: %SSiSignature: |SS 2pg 8out #10s 23x38| 1 6 1 1 |40_CTP|
It needs to retain the header but replace the field in the header here in red with the one from [%SSiSignature:] %SSiLayout: |Env Conversions (Forest).tpl| |Env Conversions (Forest).tpl| 1 1 792.00000 612.00000 8 ||

it's dead slow here obviously  :smiley:

On my 2nd day of Preps 6 training, without this training one would take a very very long time to understand what they've done with this app.

It's really good. Even better than I thought. But, so much more complicated. It really needs someone to take a week to set things up for your situation.

JDF folding patterns are sweet, the product and part assembly makes a ton of sense once you see what it does.

Lots of new goodies for web guys in there too.

until the next faster ones come out

 Model Name:   Mac Pro
  Model Identifier:   MacPro5,1
  Processor Name:   6-Core Intel Xeon
  Processor Speed:   2.93 GHz
  Number Of Processors:   2
  Total Number Of Cores:   12
  L2 Cache (per core):   256 KB
  L3 Cache (per processor):   12 MB
  Memory:   16 GB
  Processor Interconnect Speed:   6.4 GT/s


But it's slow rendering our job folders, must be cover flow or something, very laggy displaying contents of folders on our jobs NAS. Also bonded dual gigabit ethernet seems to be nonfunctional.

those of you that do multiple versions of stuff, like base + layer x thru x will love this as I do:

http://indesignsecrets.com/page-exporter-utility-peu-5-script-updated-for-cs3.php

verified working with CS3 & CS4.