Cadmus Communications

Whether it’s an example of survival of the fittest for printers or merely another entry in a long line of acquisitions, RR Donnelley & Sons put the publishing industry on notice as it completed its “trilogy of transactions” this week, a course of action the industry’s top commercial printer says will help offer its customers greater capacity and flexibility. The Chicago-based printer announced it would make an all-cash purchase of educational-book printer Von Hoffmann from Visant Corp., in a deal valued at $412.5 million, RR Donnelley officials said Wednesday. “In concert with our fully integrated international production platform, the addition of Von Hoffmann’s facilities will offer

More than 100 executives from the book publishing industry made their way across New York City on the eve of Jan. 11, through a particularly heavy downpour, to Café St. Barts to examine offshore printing at a monthly meeting of The Bookbinders' Guild of New York. "With so much work moving offshore," as the meeting flyer had announced, the meeting organizers felt the subject was an essential one to address. And, despite the cold wind and rain, the topic lured in attendees. "Attendance was about 120—larger than most of our meetings," says Marvin Dunkiel, program director for the guild and sales director

In compiling the Top 30 Book Manufacturers for our print issue (May/June), some privately held companies, whose revenues may have qualified them to be ranked, chose not to participate. In order to recognize all the book manufacturers surveyed for the ranking, BookTech editors compiled this alphabetical listing. Ambrose Printing, Nashville, Tenn. Alcom Printing Group, Harleysville, Pa. Balmar Inc., Falls Church, Va. Banta Corp., Menasha, Wis. Bertelsmann Arvato, New York Bolger Concept to Print, Minneapolis Burton & Mayer, Brookfield, Wis. Cadmus Communications, Richmond, Va. Carter Printing, Richmond, Va. Cavanaugh Press, Baltimore Cedar Graphics, Hiawatha, Iowa CJK, Cincinnati Commercial Communications, Hartland, Wis. Courier Corp., N. Chelmsford, Mass. Dickinson Press, Grand Rapids, Mich. Dollco Printing, Ottawa Dome Printing, Sacramento, Calif. Edwards Brothers, Ann Arbor, Mich. EP

There's only one way a print shop makes money: When the presses are running. When presses are idle, jobs are delayed, worker productivity plummets, and customers start screaming. Excluding system failures, the biggest culprit behind downtime is the make-ready process. That's when operators shut presses down to adjust paper size, ink settings, and feeders. Make-ready limits how many jobs printers can fit in an eight-hour shift. But some press manufacturers offer technology that cuts make-ready time to zero. They're called, appropriately enough, zero-make-ready (ZMR) presses. "The time it takes from form to form, plus how many signatures of waste you create form

Maybe we have an answer to all our prepress problems. It's called PDF. That's short for Portable Document Format. It's Adobe's file format. It's not difficult to grasp the basic principles of what PDF is all about. But it takes more than the page I have here, so please go read our related stories, then come back. All done? Good. (OK, for those of you who hate to flip pages, you should at least know that a PDF file can be made from a PostScript file. PostScript is the final format of a file made with Adobe's PageMaker or Illustrator programs and Quark's QuarkXPress, among others.) So, you