[MikeM33]

I work for a service bureau that prepares phone books for printing. In the Art department we have to set-up the yellow page sections. These involve lots of 4 color advertisements. The ads are brought into the final pages as EPS files (they're eps-ed from Quark files, generally).

Anyway the biggest hassle is the time it takes to print proofs from the paged documents. We just acquired an Oki9500 4 color laser printer and upped it's memory to 1 GB. With luck I can send like 10 pages at a time and it takes about 10-15 minutes for them all to print. I also cannot do anything else on my workstation while these pages are printing so it totally backs me-up with my other work.

My co-worker mentionned something about a print server a while ago. I'm wondering if this would be the way to go or not. Niether of us has had much time to research it, but maybe it's the right direction to start looking. I've worked with RIPP stations before, but that was strictly for output to film. Ultimately it would be cool if we could just send all this stuff to a print server and "release" each print job from there into the printer. Tbhis would free us up to get other stuff done without having to babysit each print job going over from our workstations.

Anyway I'm not asking anyone to my homework for me here, but maybe someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance

MikeM

[redrockdes]

Originally posted by MikeM33:
I work for a service bureau that prepares phone books for printing. In the Art department we have to set-up the yellow page sections. These involve lots of 4 color advertisements. The ads are brought into the final pages as EPS files (they're eps-ed from Quark files, generally).

Anyway the biggest hassle is the time it takes to print proofs from the paged documents. We just acquired an Oki9500 4 color laser printer and upped it's memory to 1 GB. With luck I can send like 10 pages at a time and it takes about 10-15 minutes for them all to print. I also cannot do anything else on my workstation while these pages are printing so it totally backs me-up with my other work.

My co-worker mentionned something about a print server a while ago. I'm wondering if this would be the way to go or not. Niether of us has had much time to research it, but maybe it's the right direction to start looking. I've worked with RIPP stations before, but that was strictly for output to film. Ultimately it would be cool if we could just send all this stuff to a print server and "release" each print job from there into the printer. Tbhis would free us up to get other stuff done without having to babysit each print job going over from our workstations.

Anyway I'm not asking anyone to my homework for me here, but maybe someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance

MikeM

Hi Mike,

Since you are printing to a color laser printer, I am assuming these are not contract proofs that require color accuracy. You might be able change your printer settings and pick up some speed that way. For example, on my Tektronix color laser printer, the highest print quality is called "Photo." The "Enhanced" and "Standard" settings are the next steps down in quality and will print complex pages faster. Maybe the OKI has some similar settings choices.

One other suggestion: You could create a PDF of an entire document at a lower resolution (150 dpi for instance) and print from that.

Good luck!

[MikeM33]

Thanks Red, that's something to keep in-mind. I've only been here a few months but they seem to have such strict procedures that it'd be great to just PDF the whole book and print-it, but it's like "we can't do that". for some stupid reason.

But yes that would seem to me to be a logical way of output. The customer needs to sign-off on a proof that closely matches what the finished proof will be in detail. Color accuracy isn't expected though (I.E. as long as "yellow" prints "yellow" they'll get the general idea and sign off on it).

I guess the biggest problem is these things are extremely text and EPS instensive, I mean just open your phone book and look through the yellow pages. That sort of thing.

MikeM

[godzookie2k]

maybe at the end of the day throw all of them into the Printer queue and every 10 set to be scheduled at different (1 hour?) intervals? That way you aren't bogging the printer with more than 10, and you can get all your proofs out in one night to send out in batch the next day?


But it really seems like you need a rip.

[gadster]

Originally posted by MikeM33:
I work for a service bureau that prepares phone books for printing. In the Art department we have to set-up the yellow page sections. These involve lots of 4 color advertisements. The ads are brought into the final pages as EPS files (they're eps-ed from Quark files, generally).

Anyway the biggest hassle is the time it takes to print proofs from the paged documents. We just acquired an Oki9500 4 color laser printer and upped it's memory to 1 GB. With luck I can send like 10 pages at a time and it takes about 10-15 minutes for them all to print. I also cannot do anything else on my workstation while these pages are printing so it totally backs me-up with my other work.

My co-worker mentionned something about a print server a while ago. I'm wondering if this would be the way to go or not. Niether of us has had much time to research it, but maybe it's the right direction to start looking. I've worked with RIPP stations before, but that was strictly for output to film. Ultimately it would be cool if we could just send all this stuff to a print server and "release" each print job from there into the printer. Tbhis would free us up to get other stuff done without having to babysit each print job going over from our workstations.

Anyway I'm not asking anyone to my homework for me here, but maybe someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance

MikeM

Firstly, make sure you have background printing turned on.

Secondly, in the Quark print dialog, under the 'settings' (tab or is it output? or options?. Can't remember) change the output dpi to, say, 100dpi and change the screen option to 'printer'. This makes a much smaller spool file than 600 or 1200, since Quark only sends the minimum amount of data needed. You might want to play around with the setting to see what gives you good enough results.

When you are happy with the settings,set up a Printer style for this and away you go!

As redrockdes says, you'd be better off pdfing the thing (BTW, the tip above also applies when you print the postscript file.)

What do you need to print them out for anyway?? You can just email a pdf to the proofreader if needed. Save your company a fortune, get yourself a promotion.

[Corys]

Sounds like an OPI solution might be of help..

I haven't used this product, but it would seem to solve your probs if you are running in client/server environment

http://www.helios.de/products/OPI/ES_OPI.html

[MikeM33]

Cory's that sounds interresting I read the link you posted. The only thing is from what I read there it sounds like it turns the images into low res. We couldn't have low res images at ouytput for proofing. Maybe I misunderstood the link though. If it can output at 300 DPI then it's definitely an option.

Thanks for the info.

MikeM

[Corys]

you have a low res image that you place on your client machine..when you print, the OPI server automatically swaps out the low res with the high res..

the server is doing all the work, not the client workstation..

we run a OPI type server here and it saves us a ton of time.