How to Improve Newspaper Printing Quality in the Digital Age

After successfully overcoming the challenges of television, the newspapers were again faced with the threat of "new media" on the Internet. But newspapers can continue to thrive because they have the best resources for collecting, disclosing, and distributing information. However, to maintain this advantage in a new environment, newspaper managers must analyze the direction of their business development: Are you in the information industry or the printing industry? Or both? For many newspapers, the greatest opportunity lies in the collection and disclosure of information, rather than production and distribution.

Digital technology can separate the process of creating newspaper content from the production and distribution process. However, this will also create a series of new challenges. The convergence and management between them is a prominent issue. With the increase of columns and layouts, the complexity of newspaper production management has increased beyond the ability of manpower to handle. The “paper recording” tracking management method has been unable to keep up with the development of the times. Therefore, maintaining the balance between editing and printing in newspapers requires sophisticated data management tools, which requires the development of a full digital workflow. It not only can strengthen business control, but also can improve the work management mode, and at the same time it has a positive effect on the formulation of color printing processes.

Strengthen control

Your goal is quite clear: try to print in color as much as possible, and increase the number of regional versions to be able to do targeted advertising and content while reducing costs. Although this may sound difficult, it is absolutely possible to do it through a full digital workflow. As long as all articles and advertisements are in digital format, newspaper producers have more control and flexibility, regardless of the number of columns and versions they export. Digital document storage pages are easier to process than film or dot matrix storage and are easier to control.

For newspaper printing, especially in print shops in different places with multiple printing presses, the progress of all-digital workflow is of great significance. First of all, the digital workflow has made the page layout more flexible, and the imposition method can meet the requirements of the editorial department, the advertising department and various printing workshops. The trend of digitalization will allow you to make better use of existing satellite systems. Moreover, the all-digital workflow greatly improves reliability by balancing workloads and fault tolerance for different output devices.

Even after the layout is transferred to the printing shop, the benefits of digital workflow can be reflected. Because the digital workflow has the flexibility to apply different output parameters at the last minute, newspaper producers can tailor the images to be printed to suit different printers, so that the colors printed by multiple printers can be consistent . Finally, although the film will still be used for a period of time, direct plate making will become mainstream as it brings more efficient, high-quality printing.

In addition, with most newspapers stressing cost control, the development of full-digital workflows will enable your newspaper to effectively reuse content, categories, and advertisements in new media, such as the Internet and CD-ROM.

Improve work management mode

Newspaper printers have always faced many deadlines, and these deadlines have become increasingly difficult to cope with. Regardless of the increase in columns or versions, more information must be processed within 24 hours. This is the bottom line.

While improving the efficiency of layout processing can benefit productivity, more significant efficiency improvements are achieved through better job management. Since the system often handles many changes at an urgent time, the processing power of an individual page or part of a page will greatly contribute to the production efficiency, and it will be even better if the process is “upstream”. This approach requires your work management system to use existing functionality. For example: An open page with text above and ads below. A good work management system is capable of outputting advertisements before the text is ready, and then connecting the two parts in the plate making process without additional manual stripping. Even for color pages, this solution is feasible.

Work management can also cope with the challenges of publishing multiple regional editions. For newspapers that are distributed through multiple printing points, coordination is more difficult than printing at one or two printing points. A powerful job management system provides the ability to identify each plate. In this way, the press shop can confirm that it is using the correct printing plate. Not only that, the system can also provide methods to production managers at the headquarters to verify that the received plates are correct and printed at different printing plants.

Undoubtedly, the dot matrix workflow used by many newspapers is the current standard. They are more reliable, and most newspapers have installed the necessary infrastructure to support this process. However, because the dot-matrix files are large and require a large amount of bandwidth, they are insufficient in terms of speed. In addition, the work management system must be able to process the dot-matrix file for a variety of different resolution output devices and have the ability to handle compression distortion. If the system can process Postscript and PDF files in addition to processing lattice files, it can further increase production capacity.

Another link that can save time in the work management process is proofing. Advertisers spend a lot of money on creating brands and advertising materials, and using color images can enhance brand efficiency. The production system must support synthetic proofing and color separation proofing equipment, including soft proofing, so that problems can be identified before printing.

Formulating routines for color printing

From the economic point of view, color is an effective way to attract high-profit advertising. High-quality color printing can increase readership and circulation in a highly competitive market. In the end, black and white printing will be difficult to compete with color printing. Although the goal is clear and easy to see, it is more difficult to achieve. The color printing of newspapers must be able to accommodate multiple printing points, a variety of presses at different times and with different capabilities. Unless the colors are standard and accurate, advertisers will be disappointed and readers will be lost.

The all-digital workflow is a key factor in achieving consistent and reliable color production, as it enables the output parameters to correspond to each press. Using calibration tools such as spectrophotometers and color management software, the entire process starts with identifying the characteristics of the press. Push back all the way to the capture of the image, whether the image was captured in the traditional way, or scanned with a digital camera.

Once the data is collected and the calibration curve is set, the work management system can apply the correct data to each output device, ensuring that each printing plate at each printing point achieves the best results. This system alerts the operator when there is a discrepancy in the format of the document, a problem with the color space or color gamut, or when the customer-provided advertisement has a spot color and the plate is not printed in a spot color.

PDF: Portable, Reliable, Flexible

Time has never stopped and never slows down. The competition in the newspaper industry requires every step of the newspaper production process to be as fast as possible to increase productivity. Nowadays, there are many kinds of digital workflows on the market, and whatever type you use, it will have a huge impact on production volume. One of the most common workflows is to transfer rasterized pages with high resolution, providing high reliability, but not enough speed and flexibility. Not only are the dot-matrix files large, they put pressure on the electronic delivery system and it is not possible to "reuse" these pages on other media.

The advent of PDF (portable file format) has brought a breakthrough to the newspaper industry: it has both the reliability of dot-matrix workflows and the high efficiency of compressed text formats. The current workflow requires that the Postscript document be rasterized into a dot matrix format before it is transmitted. PDF can separate the data analysis step from the dot matrix processing step, allowing the transfer step to occur between the two. In that way, the editorial department can produce a stable and reliable document without having to screen at a specific resolution at this stage.

The advantages of PDF are many: PDF can output the same style on any device, and can pass different output curves to correspond to different printers. Moreover, the file size of a PDF document is only one-twelfth that of the same Postscript document and one-fifth that of a TIFF/IT file. Therefore, Associated Press Adsend selects PDF as the document exchange format and hopes to obtain ANSI/ISO certification.

PDF also solves a series of hardware and software compatibility issues because it is a platform-independent format supported by 16 different operating systems, including Mac, Windows (9X, NT, and 2000), and Unix. Acrobat 4.0 and PDF 1.3 support automated workflows for PJTF work flyers, OPI 2.0 specification, two-tone (used on Postscript3 RIP) and spot colors, Acrobat 4.0 also has "digital signing" tools, so that editors and advertisers do not have to Signing on the page will make it acceptable.

With Apple's new operating system (OS/X) and Adobe's InDesign application software, working with PDF is even more seamless, because both support PDF as an original document format. In this way, the standardization/distillation steps can be completely eliminated, further increasing productivity, without losing support for the old system, and you can still generate Postscript level 1 or 2 documents for final output and platemaking. With the sophisticated combination of PhotoShop and Illustrator, photos and pictures can be edited in InDesign, accelerating the design and modification process of the page. It can also import QuarkXPress 3.3x and 4.0x files, including style sheets, to maximize productivity.

In addition to the print production efficiency, PDF also brings other benefits to the newspaper. The first is that the same document can be published in any form (paper or electronic publication) without any additional processing. Newspapers can become electronic versions on the web without converting pages to HTML. In addition, PDF can be used as an index to support search engines so that editors and reporters can easily find old information in the process of gathering information. At the same time, a new source of income can be created and paid for by readers who need to obtain overdue newspapers.


Source: "International Printing"