Gavin writes:

> > PageMaker seems to be designed to take materials and transfer them
directly
> > to the printer quite efficiently.
>
>  Depending on how high a quality you're talking about for production.
>  4-color (or more) offset printing is quite a complex operation, and
>  preparing materials for this kind of printing requires a lot of skill and
>  experience from what I've seen.  It's quite different from just getting
>  something to look nice on a single pass digital printer.

Let me disagree with Gavin on this first point. It isn't the interest of the
printer to make it a complex process -- and if you follow standard
guidelines, it can truly be quite simple.

Those of you who are Adager customers get a flyer with every update tape that
we produced concerning QueryCalc. Rene Woc repeatedly asked me to provide
something like this so that they could include it in their mailings. The
result was the flyer we call the "Adager ad."

Of perhaps greatest interest, that flyer was produced wholly on the HP3000,
using only QueryCalc, just as your calendars are. The difference between a
single-pass printer, where all colors are printed at once, as in your
calendars, and a four-color process, is that for the second method, you have
to create four pieces of output, one for each of the four printing colors:
cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

I wrote the code to produce this sort of output for a four-color printing
process inside of QueryCalc -- and that code goes out with every copy of
QueryCalc -- although a customer can't get to it -- so that QueryCalc could
generate its own advertisements.

Instead of producing the output in the manner necessary for a single-pass
color printer, where all of the color information is available in one
PostScript command (setcmyk), QueryCalc performs the necessary color
separations and creates four separate b&w output files, simultaneously
creating the page crop marks, alignment circles, and generates the standard
color test patterns off to the side of the primary printing area. This is
exactly what other packages such as FrameMaker do, too. It's not particularly
difficult code to write.

These outputs can be created either as output to paper or as PostScript or
PDF. files. Most printers will take any of those, but the electronic transfer
method greatly reduces the degradation you get in the
paper-to-camera-to-plate steps.

To print the "Adager ad" flyer, we simply sent the four color separation
files (in PostScript) on a floppy to a printer in Chicago. The printing house
runs the very best color press available, a Heidleberg SWOP (standard web
offset press) press. As a consequence, they were produced at a very high
quality level. Turn-around times for this kind of service are generally only
a few days.


>  > Now, .pdf was mentioned. However, according to the Rep, once you use
Adobe
>  > Acrobat to create the .pdf file, it cannot be manipulated with PageMaker.
>
>  Adobe is trying to nudge the world into adopting a publishing workflow
based
>  on using .pdf documents which contain all the high-end pre-press
information
>  neccessary to fully support the printing process.  It's actually rather
>  appealing, since you could get to the point where you spit out a .pdf file
>  at the end and email it to a printer who would be able to produce exactly
>  what you want without spending hours working with you to get things set up.

Yes. It actually has come to be amazingly simple.

Wirt Atmar