I was away yesterday and one of my co-workers got this error when he booted up the XServe in the morning. Anyone ever encountered it? He said he just clicked the blue button and carried on with no ill effects.

So the corporate entity is rolling out performance evaluations for the first time and want us to set some goals/accomplishments over the next year. I'm kind of stuck because we are already at our "peak" using old software/hardware (Nexus 10.1.3/OS X 10.8 + 12 year old Screen 8600 tied to a Windows 2000 tif catcher) and have been given no budget or timelines for upgrades. I've had two Esko technical experts in to see us over the past few years to see if we can improve or gain efficiencies with what we have and both said "No - you are doing all you can with what you have...". 95% + jobs received have either soft or hard copy proofs out same day and our mistake ratio is about 1 per 1500 jobs right now. Not sure what to tell them in my meeting.....any ideas?......anyone? 

Anybody in the b4print word using one? I've heard that there is a lot of issues, but would like opinions from ppl that have experience with one. Since the suits shelved the idea of the HP 30000 they have been looking at Heid's Anicolor presses. 

Tough day in prepress on Friday. I have the XServe OS set up on a pair of hard drives in a RAID setup done with Disc Utility when the server was set up. One of the drives fried on Friday, but we were able to carry on using the good drive. I have a pair of spare drives that will work in that machine. Can I stick one of those drives in and rebuild that slice using disc utility? Does it matter that the spare drive may be formatted differently or have different data on it ie: will the slice rebuild format it correctly and rewrite all of the data? Another question: my local Apple guy put in a completely new set of drives and restored them from the most recent Time Machine backup from Friday. The machine fired up ok, but the Nexus app would start and then quit after a couple of seconds. I thought TMachine would be an exact clone! We ended up pulling the new drives out and putting the old ones back in so we could keep working. Baffled and kinda pissed off about it. Any ideas?

Does anyone out there have .ai files for an elegant set of wedding invitations? We don't do them here and I have a need. Haven't found much on-line so I thought I'd appeal to some of the commercial shops out there. Thanks in advance!

I upgraded my mid-2008 Mac Pro laptop from 10.6 SL to 10.10 last summer and have kinda regretted it ever since. Start-ups take forever and there is a definite lag in every operation compared to the old OS. It's probably due to the age of the machine. I'd like to downgrade to 10.8 ML and see if that runs things a little better, but am unsure of what's involved. I have the ML installer app from work, but will that work when 10.10 is installed now? 

So I've mentioned before that I started experiencing problems copying large folders to and from our Mac XServe about 3 months ago. Usually it's folders that contain >1gb of files. Part way thru the copy, it will stop and give me the message in the screenshot I've attached. That ends the copy, and I usually have to finish by copying the info folder by folder until the master folder has been completely copied. It was suggested before that it might be a permissions problem, so I have tried repairing permissions on both the server and any Macs connected to it, with no real change to speak of. Any other ideas out there?

So I've been back up and running for about a week now after my old HDD on my 2010 21.5 in iMac packed it in. We installed a Seagate 7200 rpm HDD and everything seems copasetic but if I start the iMac with wireless turned on it runs slow, and I mean slow. I keep everything in list view and when I click a folder open I can count steamboats before the contents appear. If I turn wireless off and restart everything is back to "normal" speed. Any ideas? I didn't run into this with the old HDD at all.  Any ideas??

Currently we are running Nexus 10.1.3 with the latest version of Nexus Manager that came with that download. Using OS X 10.8.5 Mountain Lion I have no trouble connecting to Nexus Manager. However, when I try to use my laptop running OS X 10.10.2 Yosemite, I have no luck connecting to Nexus Manager. Is anyone out there running an OS higher than 10.8 successfully with Nexus/Nexus Manager v10.1.3? We are trying to decide which OS to upgrade to before subscribing to (ugh) Abode CC, but we have to keep in mind connectivity to our Nexus client software. 

Well, I'm out of here 'til next week. Have a great and SAFE Christmas break everyone and thanks for another year of great prepress advice and some chuckles along the way. 

We just renewed our software (Nexus, etc) support contract for another year with Esko. After receiving an email thanking us, the email went on to say "Just to let you know, the new Imaging Engine has been released. This is an upgrade included in your support contract....". Are there any Esko users out there that employ this software? From what I could find on the net, it's more for flexo than offset, but can be utilized for both. It's also based on APPE, rather than Esko's previous stand-alone solutions. Any info would be welcome. 

We've been using the same set of cutback curves for UV and Plastic for years and they have always worked pretty well. They were originally done in Fast Calibrator, and they still work with the latest version of Nexus (10.1.3). Tweaks are done on an old dual-boot PPC Mac, as FC was an OS9 software piece. It's a pain dragging the old machine out, so we have been playing with Symphony Calculator, which seems to have been invented in Hell. Nothing works - can't enter measured values...fuck! Does anyone know what is used these days with current versions of Nexus? The Symphony I have is v1 (rev 13) from October 2011. It's more of a pain than a necessity as we can get in the way-back machine and use FC, but I thought it would be good to be more current.

We are a folding carton operation and about 70% of our plated jobs are repeat work with the remainder being "new" work, so accessing the latest revision of a job accurately is paramount. When we archive jobs we are archiving a master folder that contains all info - client-supplied files, production files, pdf proofs, and 1 bit plate tifs. Presently we are still archiving to DVD (duplicate copies) and entering the DVD into a CD Finder-based (I know - old-school!) database. That way we can quickly access the right DVD and just pull the plate tifs for repeats to our Fuji Gateway server. Quick, easy, accurate and cheap. However, the DVD shelf at most retail outlets is getting smaller and smaller and probably soon will disappear, as a lot of new CPUs don't come with optical drives anymore. The reason we are using the old version of CD Finder is that newer versions don't accurately sort DVD/catalogs by month in the catalog , but rather by alphabetical order. Also I am a little nervous about using hard drives to archive data as they can still corrupt or blow up unless you have a way of backing up the archives regularly. Anyone out there converted recently with a good system?? We will likely continue with what we have this year, but I'd like to consider an alternative for 2015.

Here's a link to a couple of cheap Illy plugins from the same folks that brought us White Overprint Detector. They look like they could be of some use:
http://us8.campaign-archive1.com/?u=ea29b7fb2eef1f09f8e6e92ca&id=85287ac531&e=86793e8790

I thought this article had a lot of good points so I am sharing with y'all. Not sure if everything can be truly applicable in our industry, as we would likely all be out of work, but enjoy:

http://positivesharing.com/2006/07/why-the-customer-is-always-right-results-in-bad-customer-service/

Is there any way of accurately cropping a pdf in Acrobat 10? I want to crop the page to a 1/8 in perimeter bleed around a dieline and can't seem to find a way of doing it accurately.

I haven't seen this happen until now, but here goes: we received a trapped, "finished" pdf file that uses a screened magenta keyline around some knock-out white text on a C+M screened background. I had to delete some junk from around the dieline on the file so I opened it with Illy CS6 (I know - I've opened a can of worms here), and the keyline comes out as a 0/0/0/0 overprinted white ie: it disappears. The only way I can make it appear correctly is to fill the overprinting white keyline shape with 0.25% screen of Cyan to reveal the Magenta underneath. I've never had to do this so I'm wondering now if the artist used some new-fangled appearance options in Illy CC that my CS6 version doesn't interpret correctly. I've attached a screenshot of the Acrobat view on left and the Illy view on the right.

I received an email from one of our production supervisors this morning that originated at our ink supplier. In the email it described some recent issues with Fuji LHPJ plates. I know we have had some blinding issues in the past, but poor press maintenance was found to be the culprit back then. Lately though we have had to replate some jobs at the 50,000 impression mark, when the plates are supposed to last for 200,000 impressions. Here's the contents of the email - I purposely blanked out the ink supplier's name. Let me know if any of you have experienced the same issues:
"Over the last several weeks we have become aware of widespread and persistent issues with Fuji LH PJ plates. The issues have been reported to me by not only our own technical team but also by paper and fountain solution suppliers. Issues are being reported across both the USA and Canada with a wide variety of ink and fountain solution manufacturers and include
 
·         Plate blinding in halftone areas. When the plate is cleaned the problem reoccurs more quickly.
·         Poor plate life – the plates are rated at 200,000+ but in fact are failing at less than 50,000 at some customers.
·         Plates streaking or catch up in the non-image areas.
·         Picture framing
·         The problem has been seen on both sheetfed and web presses.
 
The LH PJ is a positive working plate that requires no baking (in fact some users have commented that baking does not improve plate life). It appears to be offered very competitively and is picking up market share following the problems with Kodak. As ink and fountain solution suppliers we are likely to be called in to assist with this issue.
 
Please reply to the group if you have already seen this issue and what (if any) solutions you have found. If you have any insight to offer from other sources please share. There are also customers of xxxxxx who are not seeing this problem. We should identify what common factors exist that lead to success with these plates, to better assist all our customers with this potentially costly issue."
 

Got an email today with regard to a new software - Packz - that has been developed by a bunch of ex-Artworks Systems alumni. Looks interesting enough for us to check out. Mostly applies to packaging/labeling but may have other applications. Is a standalone editing/trapping app for pdfs. Supposed to be very quick with no proprietary strings as files stay live in pdf format. Additonally you can choose an Illy-type or ArtPro-type GUI so the interface is more familiar to techs that use one or both of those apps.

"PACKZ contains a complete set of prepress-, editing- and quality assurance-functions, such as trapping, separation handling, barcode creation and recognition, dynamic creation of info panels, object based screening and many more. With its modern 64-bit architecture, running under OS-X and Windows, the native PDF-Editor ensures maximum performance and usability." 

www.packz.com.

Anyone here have experience with taggent security inks? Any special coating required or can a normal Aq Coat be used? Any other special requirements? Thanks in advance!