When it comes to handling jobs in today's commercial print market, you basically have a hot potato situation: hold onto it too long and you will get burned. Hence, automation to reduce the touch points for the printing and finishing processes is now very advanced. While much progress has been achieved in these fields, print owners may well be casting their eyes at the pre-press department as an area where more could be done.

This is because general estimates put the proportion of submitted files that need errors fixing before printing at around 60%, which represents a significant time investment. If you could automate the fixing of the processes to correct those errors, then suddenly you could save a lot of time and, importantly, money.

But automating here is not easy. Changing designs without client approval is a risky business; giving complex processes over to computers can be dangerous; and some say that spending vast sums of cash to fix small problems is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The reason for the high percentage of files submitted with errors is partly absentmindedness, but mostly down to a lack of knowledge on the part of the people creating the artwork, according to Lance O’Connell, Heidelberg UK business executive for Prinect and CTP.

"When I was a student in design college, we were taught about print techniques and we knew about separations and screening – the fundamentals of ink on paper," he says. "Now, it’s all computers. Current students do not know about the print process. We have done away with the traditional training, and that is creating the problems."

Hence, when a product arrives at the printers, the errors can be numerous, varied and, occasionally,  very complicated. Bleeds, fonts, and image resolutions are the most common problems, but beyond these are so many potential issues that it would take the rest of this feature to list them. If a workflow could automatically fix all these errors reliably, then a great deal of time could be taken out of the print process.

Pipe dreams

However, Pixart Printing owner Matteo Rigamonti believes that this kind of workflow is just a pipe dream.

"The gloomy truth is that a human being will always be needed just for the final check, as the range of problems is so wide and unexpected that an algorithm can’t be created," he explains.

Richard Gore, product specialist at Fujifilm’s European Software Business Unit, counters that modern workflows can fix many of the common problems, but admits that there are some hiccups they cannot address. He also concedes that many printers would not want some of the error-fixing taken out of their hands.

"With applications like Pitstop, you can do many fixes and automate many of the common problems, but it will never be able to fix everything – or, at least, not necessarily to an acceptable level of quality for the printer and/or client . For example, you can check for low-res images and resample to a higher resolution, but we all know that depending on how low-res the source image is, and what the image is like (logo, linear, picture etc), the results may or may not be good enough."

This decision over quality can be influenced by the type of business the printer is operating. In the commercial litho world, the pre-press stage of the process is extensive, and involves a high degree of interaction between client and printer to get the end result right, with the client having final approval. In the digital world, however, there is more willingness to hand control to the software to get a quicker result. And the software appears to be up to the job.

"We have found that in the digital print environment, it tends to be quite an anonymous process, especially with W2P," reveals Kodak pre-sales consultant David McGuiness. "As a consumer, you know that when you upload a photograph, it is down to you to decide what you want. In return, you get it for a set price and that file is rushed through the system via automation, so you get the product very quickly. The commitment for the results is on the customer, not the printer. There is very little – if any – interaction between the two. It needs to be that way to get the margin on the job, as that is why the work can be delivered for the cheap price."