I am in (a small dinghy) of the same boat. I manage 7 weekly's and 10 annual supplements with a staff of 5. We are still pasting up all but two papers and are moving slowly into a digital workflow. We are currently designing all ads in PageMaker (no kidding) printing them out and pasting them up on boards with the edit, which is formatted in columns in Word and cut and pasted.
It's been slow going and only one weekly paper is being done in Quark (with live text being placed and pdf ads run with AdForce). The reason for the molasses momentum is because of the variety of problems that came up with all of the pdfs. Default fonts, RGB embeded images, jpeg issues, pdf's that won't separate spot colors in Quark (still haven't figured that one out). All of these things are a part of the pdf learning curve and take time . . . . but the thing that takes the most time is finding an error in an ad after the pdf is made and having to go back into the native file, make the change and re-pdf it. Alas, I too plan to purchase Crackerjack, I know a few other papers who are using it to edit pdfs and they are very happy with it.
Jackie and everyone else, a couple of questions:
1. Are you pdf-ing the editorial as well as the ads and then marrying the two into quark and making one final pdf to output?
3. Are you paginating your files? Do you use preps?
2. Are you using an automatic pdf management software? For example, do you have a server set up so that final ads are placed into an "incoming" folder that is monitored and automatically pdf'd and put in an "outgoing" folder? If so/not how is this managed? Is it a specific software or can it be set up in distiller.
Thank you so much all . . . . clearly I need a little help.
Stefanie
--
Stefanie Celata
Design Director
Enterprise Publishing
508-548-4700 ext. 251
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
on 7/31/03 6:32 AM, Rioduo at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Good morning all.
I'm happy to say that our IT depatment is finally willing to investivate the purchase of a software to help us with problem PDF's. I am in pre press for a group of 23 weekly + 2 daliy newspapers. I have suggested the 3 most talked about on this list: Quite a Box of Trick, Pit Stop or Crackerjack(?). I've given them the various links for the software, but would you all be willing to give me first hand advice? I know nothing about the software except what I've read and knowing my company, only one will be made availible to us.
The problem we run into most often is with color being RGB. We have been able to work around a lot of problem color ads by using Acrobat 5. If the color portion is a photo within the ad, it's usually not too much of a problem, except that we often won't find out until it doesn't separte to film. Then it's a mad dash to try to fix the file.
Twice this last week though, we've had ads with text created in something other than a layout program, say possibly Illustrator or Photoshop, often ending up with 4/C black text. If we suspect a problem ahead of deadline, we can often contact the artist to correct the problem, but usually, it's not discovered till right on deadline to print. I usually don't have direct contact with agency artists, we have 13 offices with thier own sales rep's & comp people, then the files are sent to us.
We are on Mac's, I think my 'new' computer will be running in OSX classic (our G3's were stolen). We impose our pages in Quark 4 to send to film.
So if you had to pick only one, which one would help us the most?
Thanks,
Jackie
