Menasha, WI

When it comes to computer-to-plate printing, more printers and publishers join the ranks of the believers every day, either experimenting with CTP with their four-color jobs, or switching to it by Tatyana Sinioukov Despite some limitations, as discussed by industry professionals below, CTP for four-color book production saves time and money and offers faster turnaround and higher quality than a conventional, film-based workflow. That's why more and more printers and publishers join the ranks of the believers every day, either experimenting with CTP with their four-color jobs, or switching to it completely. According to Frank Ervin, vice president of training and technology at

CTP Veterans Share Tips For Publishers Taking Their First Steps By Tatyana Sinioukov So what's a publisher to do when considering going CTP with four-color work? Do your homework, first and foremost, insists Rick Wills, electronic prepress manager, Banta Book Group, Menasha, WI. Tom Carpenter, director of book development for the North American Outdoor Group (NAOG), Minnetonka, MN, agrees, suggesting visiting a publisher who is already using CTP as a first step. "We all know people at other publishing companies, and the technology isn't proprietary--I can't see where anyone would have a problem showing you what goes on, as a professional courtesy," he muses. "You can't understand

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