Exchange of Experience: The Key to Newspaper Application CTP

The newspaper's production line is very long. From the reporter's interview to the newspaper's breakfast table at the subscriber's breakfast table, there is another link in one link. If there is a delay in the scheduled time, the daily newspaper will be delayed, even in some remote areas. There is no opportunity to receive the newspaper of the day.

If we push forward from the time when the subscribers read the newspaper during breakfast, each township will be reported by a fixed delivery vehicle. The circulation of each newspaper in a township may not necessarily be large enough to require a newspaper to independently undertake printing. From the factory to the newspaper delivery center in this township, there must be many newspapers sharing the cost of delivering goods from cities to remote townships. So a newspaper cannot be on time and will cause delays in the delivery of all newspapers. Usually on the basis of cooperation, there is a penalty for avoiding black sheep. The simplest penalty is to abandon late newspapers so that everyone will not be late.

Therefore, the time for the newspaper to leave the printing factory must be controlled to be delivered on time to the destination of the delivery vehicle. That is to say, the time for the newspaper to start printing has to be controlled. Otherwise, how can the newspaper be released on time? Therefore, the time for the printing plate to be hung on the rotary machine has to be well controlled, and there are so many editions of a newspaper. In some regions, the same news layout and advertisements in different places have to be managed carefully. Advertisements placed by customers in Beijing appear. In the Shanghai section, customers will not pay.

Since the printed version must be on time, the editing system must complete the layout editing after the deadline for the scheduled output; the prepress department is responsible for finishing the layout of the layout, from the newspaper layout software output to the completion of the printing plate, in addition to the time requirements Take care of the quality of printing. Layer-by-level time barriers make newspaper prepress production processes different from commercial ones, although both processes use exactly the same technology, such as Postscript, PDF, RIP and Page Pairing, digital proofing, laser photocopying Machine and CTP direct plate making technology.

The biggest difference is that the PS/PDF files of the newspapers are stable, that is, they come from the same typesetting software. Commercial printing may come from a variety of different application software and the stability is not well controlled. The most important difference is the urgency of the time. Even if the printing press malfunctions, it can still seek help from other printers. It is not a day or a day. The printing of newspapers is different. If you follow the above-mentioned layers, you may be held accountable for 5 minutes.

Therefore, newspaper printers and commercial printers have different speeds. How does the prepress process implement such an anxious time requirement? In particular, the CTP direct plate-making machine shortens the time cost of film printing for the newspaper pre-printing process. In addition, it can transfer the CIP3 ink-controlled data to the printing machine, which facilitates the saving of ink and paper. How to make these benefits work in the newspapers and clocks process every second?

Let's take a look at how the pre-press process of the Taiwan United Newspaper Group is giving CTP its due value. The United Daily News has three printing plants in Taiwan, which can meet the needs of printing in the three regions of North, Central and South respectively. It can be divided into different plate-making needs in 21 counties and cities. All prepress work is in Taipei City. The total complexity of the headquarters is quite different from most of the newspapers in the Mainland.

1. Taiwanese newspapers have about 16 to 20 large pages per day. Each large sheet is 4 large and divided into four or five stacks. Each stack is printed once by a printing machine. There are color and black-and-white layouts. There are some entertainment versions. The whole stack is a color version. Most of the classified ads are black and white, and their daily weight is different. Usually, classified advertisements on weekends are particularly high.

2. Although all of Taiwan’s political, sports, and supplements of the “United Daily News” are the same layout, different localities have different news sections to meet local needs. For example, Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli share the same three counties and cities. The local news page is different from Taipei or Kaohsiung. Therefore, when different printing companies print, they must take care of different local news releases.

3. Commercial advertising is even more complicated. Because this is the newspaper's economic source, the newspapers are trying to create more advertising layouts in a limited-day layout, so they have the following ideas.
In metropolitan areas such as the Taipei area, most of the outer areas including Taipei City share the same general environment and living information. The “United Daily News” divides Greater Taipei into A/B editions. This means that only half of advertisers' advertisements on the front page of Taipei City can see your advertisements, unless you pay twice as much advertising fees as A and B versions.

In addition, foreign counties and cities like Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli are geographically adjacent to each other, and advertisement layouts are managed together to flexibly allocate advertisements that are not easily controlled every day. For example, ads of the 8th edition of the second half of the international edition are only one and a half versions today. The same advertisements are used for the 8th edition of the Miao 3rd place. If there are 3 and a half versions of the ads, the Peach and Bamboo Miao will publish different advertisements. In this way, you can imagine the same international version. There are sometimes 23 editions in Taiwan's 21 counties (Taipei and Kaohsiung have A/B editions). At least one edition of Taiwan has one advertisement and international news edition.

4. Needless to say, if different printing presses, different printing presses, may be due to the size of the printing plate, or a certain version needs to be backlit, they can't be mistaken in the making of the plate (usually there is a graphic The part of the ink; anti-sun is a part of the graphic without ink.)

Managing the above-mentioned intricate platemaking conditions, we have jointly reported that there are thousands of PS editions printed on each day in three printing plants. The use of the database to manage the daily table of thousands of printing plate conditions is actually a trivial matter for computers. The problem is that How to ensure that the layout of the head office inspection, whether it is on the screen or digital proofing printing, is guaranteed to be exactly the same as that printed on the printing machine, and it must be able to meet the urgency of the newspaper's time.

Of course, all pages will be output PS file after editing and proofreading confirmation. After RIP becomes electronic film (1-bitTIFF) file, electronic film is sent to the “Complete” directory and distributed to 3 printing plants. The automatic layout software compares the conditions of the daily layout table and automatically composes a large version of the two A2 films and assigns it to the CTP plate. As long as the electronic film can be delivered to the printing factory in real time, the number of CTP platesetters is enough to digest the output of the large version, and the joint report has installed 23 sets of CTPs.

Who will ensure that the large version of the printing factory is 100% identical to the one completed by the editor? Of course electronic film. The United Daily News used digital lines to transfer electronic films more than ten years ago. There are mainly the following reasons.

1. The content of the image data after RIP, there is only one object - is an image, but a PS or PDF file, which has tens of thousands of objects, a word, a line, a photo in the PS / PDF file Each one is an independent object. A photo can be seen with a problem at a glance. If you miss a line, you have to be careful.

2. If PDF is received at the end of the printing plant, the factory must have the ability to handle RIP, not only the cost is high, but also the most important is the responsibility; even if it can solve the problem, it must return to the headquarters to truly confirm whether the problem is solved. .

3. The one page as a unit is used to send a large version to the printer. The most important thing is that the front-end editing department's job is one page, and the one-page transfer is faster than the transmission of one large version. The time is also shorter. Such changes in advertising and news layout changes, if completed at the head office, will lose much of their flexibility, which will increase the risk and inconvenience.

Actually, the United States nationwide USA Today and The New York Times are all operating in the same way. They only use CTPs of different brands. The complexity of the platemaking is not as good as that of the United Daily News. As long as the major newspapers in Europe and the United States have long-distance printing presses, most of them transmit electronic films, and almost no PDF files are transmitted. This is because of the above reasons.

At present, many newspaper companies in the Mainland are considering when to introduce CTP platesetters. Hardware equipment is not the focus of choice. The unqualified CTP brands today are also unable to withstand the test of the market.

With reasonable processes, security, and high efficiency, new technologies can be brought to their full potential.

So, what is a reasonable process?

1. Using electronic film as a layout, first avoid possible accidents before and after RIP.

2. Establish a database of daily layout tables. Even with simple spreadsheets, you can plan the sequence of the plates in advance and schedule the schedule.

3. There is a large-scale automatic mechanism for the layout. Based on the daily layout table, the edited electronic film is automatically converted into a large version and output to the CTP.

4. There must also be a progress monitoring system that can display the status of schedules scheduled on the daily layout table in real time, and warn the backward layout in advance so that operators and managers can take necessary emergency measures.

5. Another load balancing is also an important link, so as to avoid having a CTP version that needs to be filled, there are many versions queued here, and another CTP has nothing to do. After all, the time of the newspapers is tense.

6. In order to meet the needs of color newspapers, it is possible to automatically control the same large version of the four-color printing plate, and it must be made from the same CTP device.

From the above application of Taiwan CTP, it can be seen that a production process is such a complicated process. Through the analysis of the entire details, it can be found that even if the small and medium-sized newspaper companies should give full play to the benefits of CTP plate making, they should also pay attention to these key factors.