Prepress and design

19 COLORMAN, XXL press lines at three News International production locations in Great Britain are networked via printnet. PECOM is a component of printnet and controls the production, and the presses are monitored 24/7 with the new smartmonitoring tool.

Newsprinters is the UK production company of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, and the dimensions of the printing facilities are impressive: in full operation 300,000 tons of paper are printed per year for the company’s own titles such as The Sun, The Times, Sunday Times and News of the World alone. At the Eurocentral, Knowsley, and Broxbourne locations there are two, five, and twelve COLORMAN, XXL press lines respectively, each with five or six towers. They all print non-collect – per press line 86,000 copies of a 120- or 144-page tabloid newspaper. The degree of automation in the materials flow varies. Reel preparation is generally done fully automatically by AUROSYS, including delivery of the paper to the reel splicers. The press lines are controlled and coordinated by manroland’s PECOM system, and the entire printing plant from the editorial offices to the presses ...

UK commercial print specialist, Precision Printing, installs DirectSmile Cross Media software to provide customers with highly targeted, integrated marketing campaigns and visibility of results. Using Cross Media, the company anticipates improved campaign success and increased return on investment (ROI) for customers. 

At mediaPro 2009, Precision Printing announced it would be adding DirectSmile Cross Media software to its extensive range of commercial print capabilities. This leading print service provider has been supplying printed marketing materials to many high-profile customers for over 40 years, and is now extending its offering to include marketing services across the digital media communication channels (URL, SMS and email).

Gary Peeling, Managing Director of Precision Printing, explains, "Much of the research into current marketing trends suggests that an integrated approach is much more effective than using just one communication method. This approach can raise campaign success rates by about 30-50%. Therefore, expanding our service offering to include Internet marketing methods, as well as print, seemed like an obvious progression for the b ...

Software vendors ppi Media GmbH (a subsidiary of manroland AG) and KnowledgeView Ltd., a leading publishing solutions provider in Europe and the MENA region, have strengthened their cooperation to introduce a publishing workflow with maximum automation to the Arabian market.

The Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC), publisher of the daily newspapers The National and Al Ittihad, signed contracts with the two companies. Both dailies lately optimized their publishing and editorial workflows with solutions from ppi and KnowledgeView. The result is a combined workflow that allows highly integrated processes, customized products for the Arabian market and optimized interfaces. “Since the partners know each other’s products very well, integration was smooth and only took a few days until we produced the first pages. It couldn’t have gone better,” said Raed Alkhatib, production manager at Al Ittihad. For page layout in Adobe InDesign, ppi’s and KnowledgeView’s products merge to form a unit. The RAPID Browser plug-in is directly integrated in InDesign, whereas PlanPag is linked by ppi’s InDesign plug-in InLink. InLink ...

Prime Group, based in Nottingham, was founded in 1988 as a traditional lithographic print house. In 2003, the company invested in its first digital press and using DirectSmile software has established itself as one of the UK's leading producers of personalized items including calendars, stationery, direct mail, books, brochures and gifts.

As a long-term DirectSmile customer, Prime first invested in the software almost six years ago. Jon Tolley, managing director, Prime Group, explained, "One of the major motivations for moving into digital printing was the opportunity that it gave us to stay ahead of the competition, by offering our clients innovative, new services such as variable data printing (VDP) and image personalization. We realized that in order to move successfully into these new markets we had to invest in market leading technologies, so we purchased DirectSmile software."

Prime currently uses the scalable DirectSmile Production Edition for high-volume image and document generation, and DirectSmile Online, configured to Prime's specifications to deliver variable documents, customized images and person ...