Catalog Production in the Digital Age

Digital workflow for print catalogs is hardly futuristic; in fact, it’s downright mature.

Following the dawn of computer-to-plate (CTP) manufacturing in the early 1990s, digital workflow technologies flooded the market to support the CTP ideal.

Print industry vendors and developers brought tools such as digital asset management solutions, preflighting programs, high-speed RIPs and Internet-enabled file transfer services to market in a relative blink of an eye. Since those first-generation solutions were unveiled, they have evolved to support the rapidly changing demands of catalog print production and manufacturing.

Preflighting

Perhaps the best demonstration of continued evolution of an early-day concept is preflighting. As printers moved to CTP platforms, it necessitated that their catalog customers follow suit, abolishing film from their workflows entirely, thus relying more heavily on the digital exchange of print pages.

Initially, what the industry saw unfold was a modest concession among the print supply-chain partners. Catalogers largely agreed to supply content digitally (and adopt things such as digital proofing), but usually in native application file formats, such as QuarkXPress.

As the digital relationship continued to evolve between catalog publisher and manufacturer, responsibilities began to shift, as well. The onus began to swing back to the content creator — that is, the cataloger — to supply the printer with properly created digital files that would more seamlessly integrate with the manufacturers’ CTP workflow systems.

If a printer could ensure that its customer would provide files in formats that met the printer’s own specifications, it would help clients significantly reduce prepress costs (native application files tend to require manipulation at the printer); ensure better and more consistent quality; and allow the printer to focus on its core competency, putting ink on paper.

Printers, which had quickly adopted file-verification (or preflighting) tools for their own operations, began evangelizing preflighting to their catalog customers who, for the most part, were quick to see the benefits. Solutions from developers such as Markzware Software, Enfocus and Extensis provided relatively inexpensive desktop tools that ensured the integrity and exact specifications of catalog page files before they were submitted to the printer.

To this day, preflighting remains a vital component of the print production chain, prompting the applications and their platforms to evolve and grow with the industry — thanks, in large part, to print’s seeming antithesis, the Internet. That’s right; file verification has taken flight on the Internet.

The Internet Portal

The Internet first revealed itself as a preflight-enabling platform when printers began making preflight a standard menu item for its catalog customers who were submitting digital files. Developers saw the opportunity, too, and responded with their own application service provider (ASP) solutions for preflighting files that are simply dragged and dropped into a hot folder via a standard Web browser.

As the demands on production and manufacturing grew even more daunting — with turnaround times collapsing on themselves and budgets that seem to be ever-more restrictive — the ultimate preflighting model began to take form, as a portal directly into the printer’s prepress workflow. Markzware was the first developer to blend preflight application with IT ingenuity and the Web to create MarkzNet.

What’s more slick than when the print buyer — the catalog publisher — prepares digital page files exactly according to the printer’s specifications and simply uploads the files to a password-protected URL (herein lies the portal) hosted by the printer. Then, the catalog publisher simply downloads the MarkzNet client to the local desktop, where files can be dragged and dropped into a hot folder that triggers automatic preflight. If the file passes inspection, the application initiates several actions:

- The publisher gets an e-mail notification that assures the file was properly prepared, and all is right with the world.
- The printer (perhaps the printer’s customer service rep or someone from the prepress department) gets the same e-mail notification.
- The file is automatically routed to its next destination in the workflow — proofing, platemaking or digital printing, for example.

If the file fails preflight, it obviously doesn’t move forward in the workflow (where it’s likely to cost even more to fix as it nears the press). Rather, it’s rejected and sent back to the customer, along with a detailed report of what’s awry. In as few as 15 minutes, the cataloger is apprised of the problems with the file, can fix them and resubmit the file to the printer for a second preflight inspection.

Printers weren’t the only organizations to see the value in this almost completely automated solution for digital file submission. Magazine publishers’ curiosity also was piqued, because, if deployed at their establishments, it would ensure all ad pages received were correctly prepared and complete. It also would enable the publisher to stick to its core competency, publishing magazines, versus playing prepress supplier to its ad base.

That’s one of the many beauties of digital workflow: It allows everyone in the print chain to do what they do best. Printers print, and publishers create content and retain control over its integrity virtually up to the point at which the file is submitted for platemaking.

If you’re detecting a theme of automation here, you’re beginning to see how the future of catalog publishing is likely to unfold. Preflighting is just one example of digital manufacturing automation — and that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The Next IT Feat

Automation has been a key print industry goal since CTP reared its head. Automating sometimes redundant and time-consuming processes along the print catalog supply chain is vital if the industry hopes to take full advantage of CTP’s and cross-media publishing’s benefits. Implementation of a technology like MarkzNet offers a precursor example to what Linda Manes Goodwin, executive director of Manes Goodwin Associates, a print production consultancy, calls “the big picture” for catalogers.

The future of catalog production, she says, lies in a central repository, where all images, content, pricing, product specifications, inventory and versioning information will be encapsulated and made readily available to all those within the cross-media supply chain who have responsibilities for populating or accessing the information. Images, for example, could be stored in high-resolution RGB format, enabling anyone with password-protected access to retrieve, convert, manipulate and repurpose them according to specific output requirements.

“The idea is to be able to simply populate templates that have been designed for various output purposes — pages laid out in Quark, for example — that will manifest in catalog pages, or pages designed specifically for Web content,” Manes Goodwin explains. “All of the assets would be accessible through a standard Web browser, with various levels of access, of course, and the central repository would interface with any number of internal and external systems, like marketing, inventory, Web publishing and e-commerce applications.”

If software developers and systems integrators collaborate to bring this concept to fruition, she continues, it will afford catalog producers many benefits. For example, it eliminates redundancies and provides real-time access to vital data needed throughout the cross-media publishing supply chain.

Barriers to this utopian production model, says Manes Goodwin, lie in systems integration, where somewhat disparate business systems that often speak “different languages” must be effectively linked. It will require profound cooperation from internal departments within a catalog company (e.g., marketing, production, legal, sales, creative) and both a capital and staffing commitment to IT development. An insurmountable task? Perhaps, in this economy, Manes Goodwin suggests, but as the economy recovers investments in these areas may be imminent.

What Your Printer May be Planning

IT is garnering a lot of attention in the print-manufacturing segment, as well, and it behooves the smart cataloger to keep abreast of what’s in the works. Along the same lines as Manes Goodwin’s “big-picture concept” for the production side of operations, it turns out that printers and their vendors are thinking about how IT can play an increasingly important role in their operations, as well.

Creo, a manufacturer of print industry prepress and production solutions, has significant marketshare represented at catalog and publication printers across the country, and the manufacturer has been evangelizing far and wide its Networked Graphic Production (NGP) concept.

“Essentially, it’s computer-integrated manufacturing,” explains Stacie Spindler, product marketing manager of NG at Creo. “It’s been well accepted and successfully implemented in many other industries before.”

Spindler offers an example: “If I place an order for something on Amazon.com, I receive a confirmation of my order that may include a link to the shipping agent’s systems, where I can check on the status of my order real-time. We, as customers, have a direct window into distribution, in this case.

“Up until now,” she continues, “the print buyer has had zero visibility into the manufacturer’s processes. Once they submitted a file to the printer and it went into prepress, publishers had little to no awareness of the job’s status unless they got a call from a CSR alerting them to problems,” Spindler concludes.

NGP sets out to better involve the customer (and, in most cases, the printer) in the manufacturing process, and it’s based on several Creo solutions: Prinergy, the popular PDF-based prepress workflow; Synapse Prepare, a desktop application that enables designers to create a perfect, print-ready PDF file based on exact printer directives; and Synapse InSite, the Web portal into the printer’s workflow that gives the buyer access to information such as approval tracking, real-time file collaboration and soft proofing of the final rasterized file that will be used to burn the printing plate.

In addition to now supporting PDF/X-1a, the DDAP-endorsed industry standard for digital ad exchange, it also accepts and processes Job Definition Format (JDF) data. JDF, according to the standards organization that gave it birth (www.cip4.org), is a comprehensive XML-based file format/proposed industry standard for end-to-end job ticket specifications that has the ability to carry a print job from genesis through completion. It includes detailed descriptions of the creative, prepress, press, post-press and delivery processes.

Digital Production: A Precursor to Digital Printing?

No look into the future of catalog printing would be complete without some serious discussion on digital printing. In February 2003, CAP Ventures and WhatTheyThink.com published a survey of about 100 printers, and a mere 16.4 percent suggested that the catalog industry could benefit from print-on-demand solutions such as those from Xerox, Océ Printing Systems, IBM, HP Indigo and Xeikon.

By Larry Zusman’s estimation, this may be an understatement of digital printing’s true potential in the market. Zusman, manager of VI solutions marketing, integrated marketing and solutions operations for Xerox’s Production Systems Group, says the catalog industry is among the top three target markets for its most recently introduced iGen3 digital color production press.

“For a long time, it’s been a challenge to print personalized catalogs,” Zusman says. But digital printing obliterates most of these daunting challenges. Today’s digital presses can produce as much as 100-percent variable content in color that rivals offset, says Zusman. But just because digital presses can print that much variable data doesn’t mean catalogers should go hog wild over customization. “Spot personalization is the more likely approach catalogers will take,” he says.

And because shorter runs are often less expensive to produce digitally, catalogers who produce large page-count books may find that producing smaller, more targeted versions of catalogs gives them more bang for their buck. Per-page costs are quite compelling for short- to long-run lengths (but not ultra-long runs), Zusman adds, and the presses are better equipped to handle a wider array of printing stocks, even lightweight papers.

But what’s really exciting, Zusman says, is the behind-the-scenes press manufacturer/post-processing cooperation and CIP4 standards development that’s led to a comprehensive list of in-line finishing options for catalogs.

“Digital printing and in-line finishing will change the world of catalog printing,” Zusman predicts. “Just think, in a single pass, you can now print, fold, cut, saddle-stitch or perfect-bind, and prepare the catalog for packing and distribution.”

Gretchen Kirby Peck is the president and chief creative officer of P.A.G.E.s, an editorial consultancy and freelance writing firm specializing in the graphic arts.