Total Ink coverage of a sheet

[Herman]

Is there a tool in XMF which calculates hoe many ink coverage is in a impositonsheet. We have problems on the press with minimal ink coverage and I want to have a warning when a sheet has a minimum of ink coverage so that I can place extra items on that sheet so that my ink coverage will be enough

[Ear]

There is in PitStop. I have the info included on preflight reports.

[Ear]

Here's a sample.

[Herman]

Thanks for your reply. The problem is that impossition sheets contain different pages from a document. I would like to know what the ink coverage is of the combination of those pages per sheet... Of course I can use this tool by making pdf's of those sheets. But I wondered if XMF has a tool who reads the sheets for me and warns me when I have little ink coverage on a sheet.

[Ear]

You can embed Enfocus actions into your XMF workflow. 

The long workaround is what you eluded to, with checking sheets: Place a PDF export stage (like sending full press sheets to a proofing plotter), but have it export PDFs to a static, network folder. You can then open and run the preflight report on the press sheet PDF, which should give ink coverage for each side, including marks, etc...  if it works properly, the next stage would be a hot folder, with PitStop automatically checking ink coverage for any imposed PDF that hits that folder. I know it's possible, because I export and pass full imposed press sheets from XMF all the time, to shuffle to different proofing devices.

Let me know if you need help with redirecting PDFs out of XMF.

[Joe]

Wouldn't you need Pitstop server to be able to monitor the hot folder? As far as I know stand alone Pitstop can't do that. Unless you can use a Pitstop preflight profile and have XMF monitor the folder and automatically run the preflight as files show up there.

[Ear]

Probably... unless you went all OG and have XMF dumping to a hot folder being watched by a script. But yeah, that is the desired result, but in the meantime, he can grab them out of the not-so-hot drop folder and hit the "preflight" button manually. Everyone will do it a little different, but point is, it can be done rather easily.