This is the first and only book dedicated to this popular and growing segment of the sign and vehicle graphics industries. Craig Campbell offers the benefits of his years of experience with vinyl products, ...
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June Carter Cash’s lyrics certainly apply to life and love, but also, and amazingly perhaps, to digital printing. All print-service providers have deadlines, a clock ticking, it seems, which furthers the need to reduce the time required to produce – prepare, print and cut, if necessary – a wide-format print job.
How to do this? Well, surely, by now, you’ve purchased a faster printer and more solid RIP – so, besides more coffee and faster fingers, what’s left to improve? “The finishing aspects,” ONYX says, as it proffers its PrepEdge Pro software.
PC, Mac and RIP independent
PrepEdge Pro software comprises server/client architecture, which minimizes RIP-compatibility issues. Also, it’s Mac, PC and RIP independent, which makes it workable across the board. In our tests, the software quickly proved its versatility.
An interesting twist is Onyx’s common-denominator use of Adobe’s PDF™ format in PrepEdge Pro. As a standard practice, you can open, edit and prep any PDF-formatted file your client creates and sends. No need to worry about compatibility with various revision levels, or your clients’ graphics programs, because, if their originating program can generate a Adobe, PDF-formatted file, you can print it.
Onyx’s PrepEdge Pro marketers push its ability to save you time and money. They say you’ll save 40% of work time on print-and-cut jobs and 80% of your work time on a tiling setup. Onyx also says PrepEdge Pro will save you 15% in wasted ink and media scrap.
The critical comparison begins when a customer file arrives at your shop. In our case, the general workflow is to preflight the file in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDRAW or other software, and then decide if we can send it directly to the printer.
That’s the simplistic view. In real life, the 80/20 rule reigns – 80% of the job time is in pre-production, 20% is in printing.
You know the drill
Does the file require color correction? Do we apply grommet information? Do we tile it for a vehicle graphic? Do we lay out a contour cut? These are valid, job-related questions that are followed by the realtime, job-preparation tasks. Truthfully, preproduction is where we waste most of our time.
Onyx’s PrepEdge Pro diminishes this production quagmire, which, in reality, aligns it to its marketers’ time-saving claims.
Even better, you don’t need a new RIP, nor do you need expertise in your customer’s file’s application program.
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