Photographers and data-processing employees at the Herald-Standard, a 32,000-circulation daily in Uniontown, Pa., have devised an innovative way to get around a problem with their open pre-press interface. The Herald-Standard paginates using QuarkXpress on Macintoshes, and pages are sent to a Monotype Systems Inc. full-page imagesetter. The paper uses both positive- and negative-image output devices.
At the time the negative-output device was installed, the Herald-Standard acquired an OPI from Adobe Systems Inc. through Monotype. According to Bill Palya, head of the newspaper's data-processing department, an OPI stores high-resolution photos while substituting low-resolution photos during pagination. The low-res photos flow onto the page and are later replaced with the corresponding high-res photos as the page is spooled through the system.
Unfortunately, the newly installed OPI would run for no more than 17 hours before crashing, Palya says. This went on for about six months as newspaper personnel labored with the manufacturer to keep the OPI working. During this time, there were a series of near-disastrous crashes on deadline and frequent crashes at other times, all of which slowed production. The problem also caused a series of missed deadlines. After management determined there was no acceptable solution, the OPI was removed.
Meanwhile, Charlie Rosendale, the chief photographer, read an article about Adobe Photoshop detailing how the Joint Photographic Experts Group file format could circumvent the need for an OPI. Employees tried to output pages using EPS/JPEG to compress the photos. This approach has proven much more reliable than OPI and delivers the same quality at nearly the same speed.
Palya says this solution can be implemented by any newspaper that uses Adobe Photoshop 3.0, QuarkXpress version 3.3 and a Postscript Level 2 raster-image processor.
Jim Pletcher is business editor of the Herald-Standard. Phone is (412) 439-7571.
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