The ABCs of CTP

Several pioneering newspapers have recently gone computer to plate. Should you?

by Brad Grimes

Platemaking is a grand old labor: Photograph pages, process film, assemble it, punch the plates. But it’s also laborious—a staff of people needs to strip film, expose it, retouch the images and then process the whole she-bang. And of course there are all those consumables: film, foils, chemicals, tapes, adhesives.

These days, more and more newspapers are calling on computers to cut out the analog film stage and create plates from digital images. Though not the ideal solution for every newspaper, the benefits of computer-to-plate technology are unmistakable. With CTP, newspapers can take more control over their work flow, improve reproduction quality, and save time and money—a little money, that is, and only in the long run. But going from film to CTP is neither a simple step nor easy to justify.

"We were skeptical about using computer to plate," says David Stone, vice president of operations at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. "But we learned firsthand that it works, and we learned what we had to look out for."

Future Promises, Present Gains

While CTP systems have improved over the last several years, Seybold Publications International Editor Andrew Tribute told attendees of NAA’s January Newspaper Operations SuperConference that it’s still "a technology of the future." The main reason: Most newspapers aren’t ready for it.

At its best, CTP requires that a newspaper have a complete—or nearly complete—electronic pagination system. In other words: digital in, digital out.

CTP relies on scanners and desktop-publishing workstations to capture and produce digital information. The page then goes through a raster-image processor, which converts text-and-image data into dots that will eventually comprise the printed product. Once the page has been RIPed, it moves to the platesetter, where one or more lasers expose the digital page image onto a physical plate. After processing and bending, you end up with a precisely controlled, easily reproducible plate with a high-quality image. And not a single human hand has manipulated your page.

It sounds utopian. Reproduction is improved by eliminating traditional steps requiring negatives, positives and duplicate films. Laser imaging results in far less dot gain and sharper, cleaner images. By eliminating many of the variables and vagaries associated with traditional methods, CTP also results in better registration.

But does CTP’s real-world performance match the utopian dream? Few who have taken the CTP route dispute the technology’s quality gains. Robert Gibson, who oversaw the Billings (Mont.) Gazette’s 1995 move to CTP, says the output quality alone makes the move worthwhile.

"There’s no opportunity for human error," says Gibson, now the paper’s interactive-media manager. "What you see on-screen is what you see in the paper....The dot on the page is the dot you created originally."

Another rarely disputed benefit is time. CTP gives papers the time to either double-check the accuracy of pages before burning plates (with CTP, replating is a pricey proposition) or roll back deadlines.

At Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader, which first began tests of a Cymbolic Sciences Inc. CTP system in 1996 and installed a second one the following year, "we’re now closing pages 20 minutes later, which allows for late-breaking stories," says Stone.

CTP also streamlines a newspaper’s work flow and reduces overhead. Fewer people are required to maintain a CTP system; fewer pieces of equipment are involved in CTP than traditional platemaking processes; a CTP system normally takes up less floor space; and the newspaper operation generally saves on consumables.

With 75 percent of Herald-Leader pages now CTP, "our registration quality is much better, and we’re producing less waste," Stone says, estimating the system is saving the paper roughly $30,000 a year. "We’ve justified the cost of CTP with decreased labor and by shifting bodies to the pressroom."

Ultimately, when a newspaper goes CTP, it takes a leap into the digital age, with all the associated quality, productivity and speed gains that go with it. In Lexington, those gains made the Herald-Leader a contender in the city’s commercial-printing market. The daily now uses CTP to print two college newspapers. What’s the Holdup?

What's the Holdup?

But beyond early adopters like Lexington and Billings, and current success stories such as Thomson Newspapers’ central Ohio strategic-market group—where all pages for three dailies are generated on a single PrePress Solutions Inc. CTP unit—the technology has yet to take newspapers by storm.

The reasons have changed little since the technology’s introduction. Among them: lack of digital work flow, along with the high cost of CTP systems (generally in the six-figure range) and their plates (still twice that of conventional materials).

Just 250 CTP systems are installed at newspapers worldwide, and all but a handful are in Europe. The U.S. newspapers that have gone CTP are generally small- or medium-size dailies that found the path to an all-digital work flow easier than their larger counterparts.

"European newspapers have a very high level of 100 percent digital work flow with full electronic pagination," says Seybold’s Tribute. "This means they are digitally ready to go to CTP. American newspapers have generally not made the move to full pagination yet."

Maybe that’s because going digital means a little more than scanning images into a computer, writing stories in a word processor and laying out pages with a desktop-publishing program. To implement CTP, other more complicated processes must first become digitized.

The Digital Path

Especially critical is the preflighting stage of digital pre-press, where output-bungling problems such as missing fonts, incorrect file formats or improper color separations are caught before imaging. A number of preflighting software applications on the market, including those from Markzware Software Inc., can be customized to find the most common errors.

Around the preflighting stage, CTP users must generate a digital proof on a laser printer to check for layout mistakes. "Make sure your proof is correct," Stone advises. "Making corrections later negates the advantages [of CTP]."

Gibson recalls the Gazette’s time in what he calls "font hell," as staffers tried to tweak the paper’s digital work flow for CTP. "Everything would work great until the plate fell out and there was a bad font," he says. Hooking up a proofer to the paper’s PrePress Solutions system caught those mistakes before expensive plates were burned, he says.

Proofers require constant calibration to ensure the digital proofs are accurate, consistent and match the printed product. CTP adopters should consider integrating a color-management system into their work flow so proofers, scanners, desktop-publishing applications and other systems all interpret colors the same way. They should select software using International Color Consortium color profiles for calibration so each device is using a standard color language. (For more on color management, see "The Greatest Show on Earth?" TechNews, May/June 1998, p. 8.)

Imposition, the art of placing images and pages in their proper positions, and trapping, the process of overlapping adjacent colors to avoid gaps exposed by press misregistration, are two other standard practices that benefit from digitization. Several software applications are available for each, and a newspaper should install these packages and gain experience using them before setting up a CTP system.

CTP adopters should also consider using an open pre-press interface to streamline operations. OPI lets you store scanned images on a server and replace them with low-resolution, for-placement-only images for production. This speeds up page transmission throughout the pre-press work flow. When it comes time for final output, the FPO images are replaced with the originals.

Gibson says his CTP system came with its own OPI, causing confusion between the new and existing OPIs when low- and high-resolution images weren’t swapped properly. "In the end, we just forced our platemaker to use our original OPI instead of the one it came with," he says.

Cost Concerns

Clearly, putting a digital work flow in place takes a great deal of work, which is why so few U.S. newspapers have done it. But even if your newspaper has gone digital, the cost of CTP may still be prohibitive, simply because the plates are so expensive.

CTP plate costs have remained double those of conventional systems for the past several years, due largely to development costs and diseconomies of scale. In addition, the wide range of platesetters generally requires specific plates, eliminating the ability to shop around.

As a result, the more plates you need, the more expensive CTP becomes. If your newspaper runs on multiple presses, requiring several plates per page, "any cost benefits of CTP disappear," Tribute says, estimating that four plates per page appears to be the current break-even point. On the other hand, if your newspaper produces fewer than 50 plates a day, it may be too small to justify the investment in CTP, according to Tribute.

It’s for that reason that small and mid-size dailies now make ideal candidates for early adoption. Plus, "they tend to have implemented full digital work flows first because their editorial staffs are smaller, and it’s easier for them to introduce a simpler, electronic page-makeup approach," Tribute explains. "In addition, these papers generally only print with one press, so they don’t need to make multiple plates."

The Cadillac (Mich.) News is one example of a small newspaper that made the transition to CTP. Last May, the 10,000-circulation daily moved to pagination. By October, it had bought a PrePress Solutions Panther Pro system and was making plates with CTP.

Publisher Chris Huckle says the fast-track transition was partly out of necessity. Some manufacturers supplying consumables for the paper’s old 3M Pyrofax platemaker were backing out, and their plate supplier had stopped making the plates they needed. So Huckle was drawn to a digital system.

"We could have gone with an imagesetter," he acknowledges, "but that would have still involved humans. We don’t receive many camera-ready ads, so migrating to pagination was relatively easy."

While lead times and quality have improved at the Cadillac News, "we’re not saving money," he cautions. "We are saving time, and we’re investing that time in other parts of the newspaper."

Huckle doesn’t expect improvements in plate costs for several years, but he points to possible savings in chemicals used to process the CTP plates. "The chemicals...are expensive, too, and there are alternatives being developed right now."

Ready for the Big Time?

Despite their less digitized work flow, larger newspapers can also use CTP. Some metro dailies are now choosing to phase in the technology to complement gradual moves to pagination, test systems and perfect digital work flow.

After beginning tests on a Western Lithotech CTP system in March 1997, The Dallas Morning News finally bought the unit last November. Because it isn’t fully paginated and plate costs remain high, the paper will phase in CTP over several years, says Jim Morton, the paper’s plateroom manager.

"We have six conventional lines, and we want to bring one line up on CTP each year," he says. "Our current CTP system is up and running, but we don’t use it all the time. We use it mainly for smaller runs," including its smaller suburban daily, The Arlington Morning News.

Morton cautions that making a partial commitment to CTP has drawbacks. "We don’t really have a page-tracking system set up," he says. "So if we choose to send a page to the CTP system, it’s hard to be sure it got there. Balancing CTP and non-CTP is a challenge. When you’re dealing with different plate processes, there are more things that can go wrong."

But larger newspapers continue examining the technology. USA Today is now beta-testing Agfa and Barco CTP systems for its national-printing applications, according to Tribute.

Coming Soon

Even early adopters admit CTP systems remain far from perfect. In Billings, the Gazette’s platemaker is usually out of commission one or two nights a week. "Sometimes we have dust in the optics of the platemaker that causes streaks on the plates, because we have light bouncing around in there," Gibson says. At other times, the feeding mechanism that pulls the plates into the platemaker doesn’t work right, causing crooked plates.

"It takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few days to fix these tiny, frustrating glitches," Gibson says. "We’ve gotten to the point where if the platemaker even looks like it’s not going to work, we go straight to film."

Despite the headaches, Gibson swears by CTP’s benefits and says the Gazette is considering buying a second, redundant system "so we don’t have to keep shutting things down."

In the meantime, CTP manufacturers continue refinements. Early CTP units either produced high-quality plates but were slow, or were fast and produced lower-quality plates.

Part of the problem was that early systems targeted the commercial-printing market, which has its own idiosyncrasies. When the Billings Gazette first installed its CTP system for a 90-day trial, staffers soon learned "it wasn’t designed for newspapers," Gibson recalls. "We ended up requesting and making 70 engineering changes. In the end, the PrePress Solutions engineer was here for eight months, working on the system until it was just right. We knew him better than [we know] some of the people on our staff."

Along with quality gains, system speeds have improved, with many platesetters capable of producing more than 100 plates per hour. (The current speed king, Western Lithotech’s Diamondsetter, generates up to 226.) Improved automation ranks high among large newspapers’ still-unanswered demands, particularly since their high plate consumption makes manpower savings key to justifying the technology.

Another area still needing improvement is plate processing. Current systems still require plates to be chemically processed, often involving considerable maintenance. CTP plates are most often photopolymer or silver-based, meaning they are light-sensitive and must be handled under a safelight. Plus, the light-sensitivity of current CTP plates remains inconsistent.

Some publishers await plates that are sensitive to heat instead of light and don’t require processing. Thermal plates, for example, can’t be overexposed or underexposed because nothing happens to them until the platesetter’s laser reaches the appropriate temperature—removing yet another variable from the platemaking process.

Despite thermal’s promise, present-day results remain discouraging. Because of the higher temperature requirements, thermal lasers must heat to the threshold temperature before imaging, a time-consuming process keeping the fastest systems at 75 plates an hour or less. More powerful thermal lasers (the most expensive components of any CTP system) push system costs still higher.

Howard Publications Inc. has tested thermal-platesetting systems at The Times in Munster, Ind., for several years, generating 11,000 thermal plates, according to Larry Maas, Howard’s corporate production director. The systems "ran very well," but at nearly three minutes per plate, processing time still proves unrealistic for an operation burning 1,200 plates per month—including 80 in the last hour of production each day. However, tests provided hints of thermal’s potential.

"The quality was so great, artists in advertising asked if we would run their ads on CTP instead of film," Maas says.

Do Your Homework

When it comes to evaluating CTP, do your homework. Get as close to full pagination as you can, and then analyze the size of your operation to see if you can justify the cost.

If you decide to adopt computer-to-plate technology, keep a few tips in mind:

Have PostScript experts in-house. PostScript is the software code that makes electronic data readable throughout your digital work flow. (If you have an imagesetter, you’ve probably already done this.)

Bone up on your network. Make sure it can handle the hefty amount of data that will be moving across it. And since you’ll want the data to move quickly, you may need some extra bandwidth.

Concentrate on preflighting. You’ll no longer have the luxury of a film proof. For a CTP system to pay off, you need to keep errors at a minimum. Lexington’s Stone says preflighting software has proven effective in tracking fonts and other page elements at his operation.

Understand digital proofing. It requires a slightly different kind of training. Operators need to learn how to calibrate and maintain a color proofer in order to get consistent results. Retouchers and quality-assurance folks must understand the characteristics of a digital proof to make judgments based on the real relationship between the proof and the final product.

Check server space. The old saying that you can never have too much disk space goes double for CTP. All your text and images will be stored on your server until plates are made and data are no longer needed. Servers need to be fast and fault tolerant, so data aren’t lost if something breaks down. You’ll also need a fast, safe archiving system to back up your work. Try optical drives, DAT tape or digital linear tape.

Take a long-term view of cost savings. It could take a year or more to realize any financial gains from CTP; initial benefits will be quality and faster throughput. Any money you save by reducing staff or eliminating some consumables will be offset by the costs.

Be selective. Even with cost and technology issues posing potential problems, "you can still use CTP effectively," says Morton. "You may just have to pick which runs to do CTP."

Sources

• Robert Gibson, The Billings Gazette, 401 North Broadway, Billings, Mont. 59101. E-mail, bgibson@bsw.net; phone, (406) 657-1354; fax, (406) 657-1278.
• Chris Huckle, The Cadillac News, 120 N. Mitchell St., Cadillac, Mich. 49601-0640, (616) 775-6565; fax, (616) 775-8790.
• Larry Maas, The Times, 601 45th St., Munster, Ind. 46321-2875. E-mail, lmaas@howpubs.com; phone, (219) 933-3347; fax, (219) 933-3325.
• Jim Morton, The Dallas Morning News, 3900 W. Plano Parkway, Plano, Texas 75075, (214) 977-6972; fax, (214) 977-7470.
• David Stone, Lexington Herald-Leader, 100 Midland Ave., Lexington, Ky. 40508. E-mail, dstone@herald-leader.com; phone, (606) 231-3295; fax, (606) 231-1450.
• Andrew Tribute, Seybold Publications, Guildford, Surrey, England. E-mail, tribute@dial.pipex.com; phone, 44-1483-577771; fax, 44-1483-577555.

References

• Stepping Up to Computer-to-Plate, a jointly funded research project by NAA and IFRA, the international newspaper-operations consortium. To order, call (800) 651-4622, or 1 (304) 525-5562 and ask for item #10054.

TechNews Volume 5, Number 2: March/April 1999

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