I hope were ahead of the game again, said joint managing director Nick Clode.
Rival was looking for a product to allow a remote OPI workflow when conversations with TPT revealed it was developing uPrint to do just that. It has been testing and developing its system for the past three months and went live last week. The first job, for North South Publishing, was for a consumer magazine being launched in Germany.
Interest in uPrint from publishing repro houses has been very strong. Southwark-based Icon Reproduction is currently testing the system with Centaur.
Everyone I describe it to asks when can I have it?, said TPT managing director Steve Emerson.
UPrint works by allowing pages to be printed down from QuarkXPress at the publisher via a secure internet connection to the repro houses OPI and production system. All the publisher sees is the standard print dialogue box. Once at the repro house a fat PostScript file is created, with the positionals from the layout substituted for the high-res images.
When combined with Twist and its Weblink and Dialogue modules it is possible for the publisher to see pre-flight reports and check the final high-res PDF, either on screen or as a remote hard proof as soon as the page has passed through the automatic production system.
A uPrint system including hardware costs 7,500, but the user needs to have Xinet WebNative, which starts at 14,000 for software and hardware. It will work with third-party workflows as well as Twist.
Story by Barney Cox
