been a while. hope you are all doing well.

we upgraded our old platesetter a few months ago. stepped up to metal plates and this unit blows our old one away when it comes to screens and gradients. new platesetter was pulled out of a shop that went out of business so we basically got a crate of STUFF and had to try to make heads or tails of what was what. the company that sold it to us deals strictly in presses so they had no idea what they were selling, they just wanted it gone. we got the pc with the harlequin rip up and running, after replacing power supply and motherboard. worked great for a couple months and then it died. replaced a couple more parts. back up and running for a bit then died again. think it's done for good this time. we're exploring options and i had a thought that might be crazy but don't know enough about it to say. instead of buying another pc to do only one task [run the rip/output plates] why can't i just use boot camp [or parallels/vmware/etc] to run windows on my mac workstation? is this feasible? has anyone seen or done anything like this? the only downside i see is if i run bootcamp, i think i'll have to log out/log in when switching. 75% of our work is digital, though, and we run the press one or two days a week, so it's not like i'd have to constantly be logging in/out. like i said, i know zero about this side of things. i set up virtual box on my mac at home several years ago and installed linux just to mess around a little, but it was very limited. i must be overlooking something, because this seems like too easy a solution, am i right?

edit: prob should have mentioned my setup. running 10.8.5 on a 2012 imac. will upgrade to 10.9 within the month [waiting for new digital press]. 16gb ram, 2.7ghz core i5, 2tb hdd
harlequin is version 7.something. if i can get the pc to power up i can verify

xerox rep is trying every move she has to get us to take a 700 [we currently have a 252]. it has the high cap feeder and a finisher, but i'm not sure which finisher [i think it's the standard finisher] i'm gathering a list of questions/concerns for her. anybody have a question they wish they had asked before you got your 700, or impressions now that you have it in production?  i have concerns with registration from front to back on the 252, it's terrible at running coated sheets and you can only feed 12x18" in the bypass tray. how does the 700 compare?  here are some questions i'm going to ask the rep. let me know if there's anything i'm missing:

what is the max cover weight for booklets? on our current machine, 65# uncoated cover is the max. will the 700 stitch/fold 12x18? coated text/covers? max number of sheets/weight for booklets?

will the 700 auto duplex coated sheets? what is the max weight it will auto duplex [coated/uncoated]?

can i change tray attributes from my workstation? currently if paper is loaded the paper type has to be set at the machine. can i load paper, walk back to my workstation and set it from there?

our current machine struggles with screens/gradients/certain spots. any info on how the 700 handles them?

been a while. hope you're all doing well.

i have a friend who is a professional photographer. he has a gig coming up where he'll take photos of party attendees as they enter the building [kind of like a red carpet situation]. he wants me to set up a station with my laptop, drop photos on a template for 4x6" and print the pics so the guests can take home with them. he's bidding the job today and wants to know what i need. he's going to buy a printer for me to print the photos. i guess my question is if anyone has any recommendations for a nice, portable printer? i won't have any kind of cutter so, unless there are some other ideas, i think i'll need a printer and paper that will specifically print 4x6". anybody have any ideas?

just discovered this. i'm doing a mailer and using data merge in indy. just realized that i have zip codes that start with zero. when i save the spreadsheet [excel] as a csv file it drops the zeros. i've tried formatting the cells as a custom number, zip code, etc. but nothing seems to work. is this normal or some kind of fluke on my part? any ideas on how to keep the zeros in there so i can get these addressed?

anyone have one of these on their machine? how do you collect booklets coming out? the tray will only hold a dozen or two. we rigged the tray so they fall into a box but there's gotta be a better way. i want to be able to set it for a couple hundred booklets and not have to walk out there every five minutes. any ideas?

anyone with a few minutes to spare wanna take a crack at this one? 108 pages, color/b&w, 8.5x11", customer supplied to another printer who we're doing the work for. preflights ok in acrobat 9. i did the layout in indy cs4. i finally got it to rip & print one for a proof. rip choked when i tried to print another [xerox dc12 with fiery server]. tried exporting pdf from indy... no dice. tried printing to pdf 9.0 from indy... no dice. tried printing to PS. got this message:
%%[ Error: ioerror; OffendingCommand: imageDistiller; ErrorInfo: DCTDecodeFilter Source error or end in marker before scan 0 8x8 block 0 ]%%

Stack:
-dict-
-mark-
-save-

got it to export PS in acrobat and burned a new pdf. still choking. anyone want to take a crack at it? check it out here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3211598/ACollinsBranchBookFinal_print.pdf

having a bit of a head scratcher here. using carbon copy cloner for backups on g5 running 10.4.11. all of a sudden, the sparse image clone of my whole system on external hd won't mount in finder or disk utility. just to be safe, i made a brand new sparse image on same hd [so now i have two clones]. neither will mount. i've made a couple test sparse images in disk utility, which mounted ok, and mounted an old disk image no problem. ccc won't backup to either image, with a warning that the disk image can't be mounted. tried all the usual fixes. repair permissions, repair disk, etc. disk utility gives an error about not being able to repair the disk. here's the thing though, if i log in as another user the original image mounts fine but the second still won't. going to bring laptop in tomorrow [10.6.3] just to see what happens on that but i'm kinda running low on ideas. i'm almost thinking it's a ccc problem since images made outside of ccc are fine. not finding much on ccc website or apple discussions regarding this. any ideas?

so it looks like we're getting a 242, probably in the next month or so. sales guy sent minimal info on rip options. basically, the choices are:

fiery bustled controller with command workstation 4.5
efi fiery color server
creo spire color server

we currently have a doc 12 with a fiery x12e v 1.0. i guess i'm somewhat familiar with the fiery even though it's a pretty old version but if we're gonna make a change now's the time to do it. anybody with any of these setups have opinions on the pros and cons of them?

so, a little backstory, we're a small two man shop. owner runs our 2 color gto/bindery. i'm the prepress dept and run the xerox. i'll go back and help with bindery, watch the press, catch envelopes, etc if i have time and we're busy. we both try to do what we can for sales. we're pretty much at the point where we're too busy to go out and get new work but not too busy to do more work so we hired a csr. he has no print experience but a ton of sales experience. we're giving him a week or so of crash training in the shop. i know this is my one chance to get this guy trained right so i really want to get a good idea of stuff i can tell him without overloading his little salesman pea brain. i want to give him a good layman's idea of what prepress is/does, file expectations and the rationale behind it. any ideas or thoughts? i'd kinda like to give him a cheat sheet of some sort if i can compile and condense it all.

anyone else gotten the email yet? they're saying membership is too low to sustain the program. bummer....

all of a sudden ID doesn't want to print anything! other apps print fine. tried printing to fiery rip, harlequin rip, and pdf 8 & 9. everytime, i get a dialog box that says: "printing error:" and that's it. this is killing me! any ideas? going to try to trash prefs right now....

sorry, here are my specs: imac g5 ppc, tiger 10.4.11, cs4. going to try this on the pc and see if i can replicate...

i have a spreadsheet that was sent to me for vdp. setup is columns of info [name/address/city/etc]. problem is, the data was input by business name. i need to sort by zip code. how do i sort whole rows so they stay together? i know i can sort columns but that will sort the zip and not the rest of the columns that go with them. any ideas? i'm such an excel tard. there's probably an accountant's message board somewhere where they make fun of prepress guys trying to use excel....

so our service tech is here right now. nice guy but it always seems like he has an excuse for why our machine is a piece of crap. it's the paper, humidity, blah, blah, everything but the correct answer.... 'the machine's a piece of crap"

anyways, his latest excuse went up my arse sideways. he claims that using step and repeat changes the color slightly on each repeated object. so, if you have a box with a red fill and step/repeat it four times, you'll have four slightly different shades of red. before i choke this guy to death, has anyone ever seen anything that backs up his statement? he's telling me it's exclusive to dc 12's....

any one have vector/pics of the attached?

thanks!

so, i'm finally getting a vacation. only problem is that we're a small shop and the entire prepress dept. consists of me. i'd like to be able to log in from the road if we get a hot job that can't wait. it's rare that i'll have this problem, so i'd like a free or open source solution. the work computer is an imac ppc on 10.4.11. laptop is macbook pro intel on 10.4.11. any suggestions?

i'm trying to help my girlfriend out with her computer and i'm kinda lost. she's on an acer laptop, bottom of the barrel model aspire 5315, celeron 2ghz, 1gb ram with vista basic, 140 gb hard drive that looks like it's partitioned in two 70 gb drives, one named "acer" and one "data". i guess that's how it came out of the box. there are 13 gb and 27 gb free on the drives. i guess i'm trying to figure out what vista's "footprint" is and how i can slim the computer down to run a little faster and make room for her music/pics. all she does is email, internet and itunes. any of you vista users have any tips to get this thing humming? i'd imagine she has enough RAM and processor for how light her use is but this thing is sloooooow. maybe that's just normal? does vista just demand a ton of RAM? i thought about going nuclear and wiping the drives and doing a reinstall but there's no OS disc. is that normal for windows? if so, what happens if you need to reinstall windows? i'm so lost over here on the dark side. this must be how people feel when i ask if their piece bleeds and they have no idea what i'm talking about....

i know this is gonna sound weird but i'm looking for a picture of a girl flashing. i'm doing a poster for my cousin's benefit concert and my idea was to take the pic and put black bars over the girl's eyes and boobs and put the text in those bars. it's for a mardi gras theme. i've tried the usual sites (sxc.hu) and a couple of google searches but i haven't found the right pic and/or i end up on a porn site. anybody have any ideas or pics of their sister that they can contribute?

anybody have a die template for a cd cover? My band is doing some recording and I want to print the flat sheets and have them cut down to make cases. 

Anybody having problems with this? I got burned on a job already because of it. Tried to replicate in cs3 several times and everything works fine. I've gone back to doing all my data merge in cs3.

Problem I'm having is there will be random instances where the placeholder prints rather than the actual cell that it references. So, for example, it shows <<last name>>. 9 times out of ten the correct last name is there when previewed and printed but one of them will still say <<last name>>. No big deal if it's only a few pages but it's a PITA when you have a few hundred.

I'll take the same exact csv file, same layout and put it on cs3 and it works fine. I don't get it. Has this happened to anyone else? Power PC, OSX 10.4.11 is my setup....

John Nack mentions Adobe's new configurator for customizing panels in his blog. Looks.... freakin'.....awesome. Could make all of our lives a lot easier, especially if they make it for the whole suite. There are a couple screenshots and a video demo. Check it out...

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/10/introducing_ado_1.html