'Daily Breeze' of Torrance, Calif., Running Fusion Prepress

By: E&P Staff The Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., converted its prepress production to an OS X-based raster-management workflow from Fusion Systems International, Portland, Ore.

The Copley Press operation that also manages prepress for other regional publications now uses Fusion's DigiPage rasterize-once, output-many (ROOM) workflow plug-in, available for all Harlequin RIPs running on Windows, OS X and Linux. DigiPage provides digital proofing integrity without recourse to third-party software or extra hardware and automatically fixes common production problems.

Replacing older RIPs, the workflow's direct file printing, job-name cleansing, advanced true-page numbering, automated file routing and soft-proofing reduced production time and use of proofing materials.

Before it began sending pages last year to nearby Southwest Offset Printing for pairing and printing, the Breeze ran AII RIPs driving model 3850 filmsetters. When it closed its pressroom, the newspaper, built with DTI's NewsSpeed, RIPped to 1-bit TIFF separations that it sent to the printer. Produced in XPress, weeklies and inserts were distilled to PDF and transferred. The changes occasionally resulted in late file submissions, time-consuming correction cycles, extra proofs, and bottlenecks from technology limitations.

The Breeze kept using DEC Alpha-based RIPs to convert PostScript from DTI's SpeedDriver (which links to a DTI database and pagination engine) to 1-bit TIFFs. Running on unsupported hardware and operating systems, the slow RIPs were growing incompatible with evolving PostScript and PDF standards.

Producing weekly editions, typically created on older workstations and older versions of XPress, required page layouts to be individually distilled or saved as PostScript pages, each correctly named and numbered. With 300 or more pages, any correction and redistilling put production past midnight, delaying pages to the printer.

Besides intermediate proofing in regular production, outsourci printing called for hardcopy proofs at SOP and the Breeze, adding time, some waste, and little quality-control value.

After testing, the Breeze bought three Fusion OS X RIPs, each with DigiPage ROOM Workflow Plug-in, 1-bit TIFF accelerator plug-ins, and FirstProof soft-proofing. The faster RIPs shrunk the time required to get out the daily. Hot-folder routines allowed for automatic processing of DTI-generated PDFs. All 1-bit TIFF separations are now held and visually inspected before transmission to the plant. Hard proofing at the newspaper and the plant was eliminated.

For producing weeklies all XPress page layouts are now printed directly to printer queues, obviating conversion of pages to PDF, and last-minute fixes and changes are easily accomplished. The new RIPs automatically handle jump pages and sectioning, and correctly route output.

At any time a classified or display ad layout operator can print a page or series of pages to a published "Proofing" queue and automatically generate a Fusion raster-PDF showing just how the job will print, because the PDF is created from high-resolution 1-bit TIFF separations data. Production time for weeklies was reduced by 12 hours.

Processing outside jobs also was streamlined. File-name sanitizing automated the repair of obscured PDF names. A weekly that took up to five hours to manually fix before being sent to the printer is now automatically handled within minutes by Fusion RIPs, in the background.