Prayers pay off when going electronic - Standard Publishing's new electronic equipment

Cincinnati-When a high volume publishing house decides to go electronic pre-press all the way, down to digital fourcolor separations, more than one production director might heave a sigh and send a prayer heavenward. In the case of Standard Publishing, one of the country's largest publishers of religious books and periodicals, the prayers are working.

Director of editorial production Michael R. Britton who be studying computerized pre-press systems six years ago, reports no significant compatibility or training problems, no unexpected glitches, and adequate production quality with his company's completely digitized production system. The arrangement is appropriate for a firm with high volume, ample capital, less-than-fashion-plate quality requirements and connections in high-make that very high-places.

Cost justification was so great that Standard chose to hasten purchase of over $300,000 of equipment this year to round out its electronic system, which now includes a Novell network of 12 NBI and two PC-compatible word processing terminals, seven Macintoshes with 32-bit RasterOps monitors, each costing about $20,000, a 1.2 gigabyte file server, a $150,000 CyberChrome system for color separations, and an $80,000 ECRM Autokon 1000 image processor for scanning black-and-white pictures. Tbe Autokon, which scans at resolutions over 1000 dpi, can convert ale scans to Postscript-compatible TIFF (tag image file format) files, which are fed directly onto the network. it also serves as the network's final output device to film to paper.

About 70 percent of Britton's work is for Standard's own publications, which include two weekly magazines. The rest comes from outside clients who use Standard's printing operation, a percentage Britton expects will increase as the new system reduces stripping and color separation costs.

The electronic system has been phased in over several months.

Quality levels

The quality level of the new system "is fantastic," says Britton. While some industry analysts question the consistency of Cyberchrome separations, Britton has been pleased so far with the machine, the fourth commercial U.S. installation, which can produce up to a 150-line screen. One feature he especially likes: separations can be color-corrected for the type of press, paper, and even the specific press the job will be printed on.

The Autokon outputs at 1100 dots per inch and can produce a 175-line screen for black-and-white, but is limited to 12-inch-wide film.

Items yet to be purchased include a back-up image setter, possibly an ECRM Pellbox, which can process film up to 24 inches wide and scans at 3,000 dpi, and an erasable optical disk jukebox, which would give 42 gigabytes of online storage on replaceable disks.

That would solve one of the new system's biggest obstacles, which is "getting editorial used to thinking, 'Hey, I'm not going to see this 20 times, I'm going to see it three times,"' says Britton. "From the time it gets into the Mac, output to film is pretty fast. It has to be-often a full page is an 80 megabyte file, and for a 15page booklet, it gets big. We can't leave that lying around on the file server all day."

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