CTP - Computer to Plate
Cynthiana Publishing Company Drives Production with NewsXtreme
Wednesday 12. March 2008 - Presteligence installed NewsXtreme and a new Harlequin Rip last week at Cynthiana Publishing Company, Inc., in conjunction with their CTP (Screen Plate Rite News 2000) installation under the CTP Alliance with Southern Lithoplate. They will take advantage of NewsXtreme flexible imposition, scheduling, and soft proofing.
In less than 4 days from CTP installation, Cynthiana Publishing ran files seamlessly through production. Previously bottlenecks built up due to the many manual tasks of creating the plate, now the files move through prepress so much faster with NewsXtreme, according to Joshua Guthrie, Business Development Manager at Cynthiana Publishing Company. NewsXtreme takes care of all the imposition and adding registration marks to the plates. Besides the Cynthiana Democrat, their 5,700 circulation weekly, the facility also prints a TMC product and acts as a commercial web offset printer for a wide variety of newspapers and specialty publications around their area. NewsXtremes simplicity in setting up multiple plate configurations has not only created efficiencies for Cynthiana, but they have also exceeded their original plan to transition one product per week into NewsXtreme. Cynthiana Publishing was able to transition 8 publications to the new workflow within one week after going live.
The installation of the new rip has also helped speed up their production process. The prepress department has consistently finished their work early, in one case turning a 20 man-hour prepress job into an 8 man-hour job. Bad “rip” days and system crashes inherent to the old system are things of the past. The new rip set up is also configured to fix items like RGB to black conversiona process they were manually correcting with their old rip.
Next Steps for Cynthiana is to realign their incoming files and set up product schedules by staggering deadlines and publications. Mr. Guthrie sees this as an opportunity to take on more work and offer even faster turnaround to existing customers. They are currently creating schedules on the fly, but want to do it for weeks ahead of time.
The best part of the system, per Joshua, is having a unified, dependable PDF workflow, with the ability to track jobs from start to finish. “Its valuable to have a master view of everything going on.”