newbridge communications

PUBLISHER

TRAPPING

"The dirty little secret of desktop prepress is trapping," De Milo continues. "Anybody can get a desktop computer with a page layout program and produce separated film, but what they can't do very well is produce 'trapped' film, with a high degree of control in the areas where different colors abut. What I mean by that is the ability to precisely set the width of the butt line, while controlling how the colors mix and where they meet. The personal computer software that does this is primitive, slow, and not precise or powerful enough for our large, picture-laden files."

Click to view a jpeg image (15KB).

Using a conventional desktop platform and software to do the trapping on a 16" X 19" page with four pictures and a dozen linework color areas can take half an hour or more to RIP (raster image process) and output to film (an average page constitutes 130 megabytes of data). Desktop trapping packages added another 20 minutes to the process. Early on De Milo concluded that such a set-up would not satisfy Newbridge.

A proprietary system wouldn't fill the bill either. "If you buy a proprietary trapping solution, you must buy their page assembly workstation," he says, "and it makes sense to buy their scanner and so on. You're then locked into their world, without the freedom to mix and match components as time goes on. That's what led me to look for an open system solution."

The solution De Milo discovered was the Silicon Graphics workstation running Xyvision's Rip-n-Strip(R) software. He found that a test file that took 40 minutes to RIP and trap on a conventional personal computer could be dispatched in an astonishing 11 minutes on the Silicon Graphics system.

For output to film, most popular imagesetters are easily integrated. De Milo chose Dupont's Magnasetter(TM) for its screening and dot characteristics.

IMAGING De Milo's Silicon Studio for Imaging incorporates Barco Creator(TM) running on an Indigo2(TM) workstation and, to a lesser extent, Adobe Photoshop(TM). "Creator is a robust, powerful retouching tool," De Milo says, "which outputs EPS, five-file DCS, and TIFF. Our art department uses Quark Xpress(TM), Photoshop(TM), and Adobe Illustrator(TM) running on the Macintosh(R) computer. We'll easily integrate the Silicon Graphics systems with that environment using Xinet's K-A Share(TM)." Like many others, De Milo has found that Silicon Graphics systems make great "power partners" with the Macintosh and Power Mac(TM) computers.