Preps 6 - A couple of questions

[johnny_jay]

Hi guys, I am playing around and hope to finally join the 20th century. I have been messing with preps 6 (we have Prinergy 5.3) and have a couple of questions.

Can I change my templates so that the name of the Prinergy Job is on the sigs? In Preps 5 we had $JOBNAME and it worked. Does it need to be $[JOBNAME]?

I see there is a secondary shingle, vertical. Is this for nesting multiple webs? This is a problem we are having with some stocks, like 2 webs on 80# coated stock.

Thanks for reading,

John

[Joe]

We prefer having the imposition name on the plate so this is the slugline on our plates:

Code Select Expand

Job: $[impplanname]                                                    Sig: $sig - $side   Web: $web    $date $time $[color_offset]
Notice the empty spaces. If the the imposition name is long it will overprint the sig, side, etc...so we add the extra spaces as padding.

You can use $[Jobname] though.

The vertical shingling can be used for weird flipbooks where in the template the heads are right or left but the book flips vertically instead of horizontally so it moves the pages in the vertical direction instead in the horizontal direction. Most of these tempaltes are multi-section templates though so not sure if we are talking about the same thing when you say "nesting multiple webs".

[johnny_jay]

Hi Joe, Thanks for the reply. We have the imp plan name on there as well. We name all jobs in our system by the job number and we need that on all sigs. Our typical  on the sheet slug line looks like this:
$JOBNAME     $[ImpPlanName]     Sig $[SIG] $[SID] Web $WEB $[SeparationVersionNoCommon_Offset]

The last part is because we do a good number of black plate changes and the mark doesn't show when not needed.

The bend of the plate has quite a bit more, Color, Dot Shape, resolution, line screen, date, time.

We Also use the Kodak Remake Number and the device name so that press room can remake plates on the weekends.

As for my second question, what you said makes sense, playing around with a normal layout, I did not see a change when I put in 1/8" creep.

Does anyone else run multiple webs and what do you do to compensate for thicker stocks? Do you reduce the head trim slightly on the inside webs?

[Joe]

Does anyone else run multiple webs and what do you do to compensate for thicker stocks? Do you reduce the head trim slightly on the inside webs?

We don't but most of our stuff is on newsprint. The only stuff on heavier stock are low page count jobs so we haven't had the need...that I know of anyway.

[David]

we used to run double webs, but they got rid of that press.

[johnny_jay]

We have two presses that can run in tandem. 90% of our work is single web and about 10% is double. We only run as high as 32 page signatures but when the stock gets up to #80 coated gloss or matte it is starting to be a problem.

[Joe]

8:00 am tomorrow I am installing Prinery 6.0.4 and Preps 7.0.2. By tomorrow night I may be out of the printing business. :laugh:

[David]

lucky dog

[David]

not about the prinergy and preps thingie, but the part about getting out of the biz.
If it was only that easy, Joe.

[Joe]

By getting out I meant blowing my brains out. Where the hell is that DCS picture when you need it.

[johnny_jay]

8:00 am tomorrow I am installing Prinery 6.0.4 and Preps 7.0.2. By tomorrow night I may be out of the printing business. :laugh:

How did it go?

[Joe]

    Surprisingly well. The Install on the server took about an hour to an hour and a half. Using Workshop you really can't see any difference from 5.3. The new installer does have the "Downgrade" Prinergy option should you need it.

    I still have the same issue I had with the "new" Workspace that I saw with 6.0.0. It seems all existing jobs or any new jobs I create via Workshop or Insite are still grayed out with a red diagonal line through them and I can't do anything with them in Workshop. The only way I can manipulate a job within Workspace has to be created with Workspace. Which basically makes it useless if that is the way it has to work because 99% of our jobs are created by the customer in Insite.

    We use Macs almost exclusively but I do always install Workshop on one Windows 7 computer and I can't get it to work there. It always tells me it can't access the Jobs drive and to connect to it outside of Workshop...which I did but it still doesn't work there. If I try to do anything with a job from Workspace it just keeps mounting a virtual network under multiple drive letters but it still never works. I am going to have to make a support request over this I think. But on the Macs I don't really have any issues other than, on jobs created before the Prinergy 6.0.4 install, if you add pages to a page set all of the separations are set to "Do not output" but that is just a matter of changing them to output. On new jobs created in 6.0.4 I didn't see this issue.

    Unless you already have a full support plan that lets you get this upgrade for free I really don't see much of a benefit. Especially not at Kodak's plus $20K price tag for it. We have the Full Support plan so it didn't cost us any extra.

[David]

We use it on mostly Macs here as well, but I do have it on a few Win 7 boxes. On our PC's here, we had to do a registry hack to get it to see the servers, it's even worse if you want to use Colorflow.   

[Joe]

David, are you still on Prinergy 6.0.0 or have you upgraded to 6.0.4?

Can you share that registry hack?

[David]

no, we are on 5.3 something, but we will be going to 6 here real soon.
...and the hack was putting the server IP in the proxy bypass. It's easy on a Mac, just put it in the network pref pane for the proxies, but on a PC, it's a reg edit.
It may just be a Quad thing, with all their security and stuff, just connecting to a server requires an act of congress and your first born child. And, you only need to type in your username and password 15 times!