Quark with expanded horizons: A screen shot from the Evansville Courier & Press shows how a copy editor or page designer has access to page layouts and a directory of stories through separate windows on the same screen.

Evansville achieves pagination in fits, starts and finally QPS

EVANSVILLE, Ind. -- If pagination were a hockey game, the Evansville Courier Co. would have a hat trick: It scored three systems in less than 18 months in the mid-'90s.

First was the Macintosh-based P.Ink, installed in 1994 under the auspices of Scitex America Corp. of Bedford, Mass. When the German-made system's U.S. future became bleak the following year, the morning Evansville Courier turned to what was then called Sysdeco and gave Press2Go a try.

Press2Go was the Atex legacy systems entry in the Great Migration to Shrink-wrapped Pagination Sweepstakes of the early '90s. The Mac-based production system had tight links to Atex J-11 front-end systems, so line enders generated by Atex H&J were preserved when text was flowed into Quark XPress pages.

While today Press2Go gets the 335,000-circulation Minneapolis Star Tribune out the door, the system was thrown out in Evansville when the fortunes of Sysdeco, which was the short-lived identity of the once and future Atex (now Atex Media Solutions, also of Bedford), fell out of the pink and into the red.

"It took us three months to try to get that on-line," Bill Kyle, one of two publishing systems administrators, said of the brief spin with Sysdeco. "I think we produced a few pages on Press2Go," said Kyle.

What had started as a well-planned transition from a legacy system to a pagination environment built on Quark XPress suddenly became an unpleasant transition from the known to unknown. "We had already offered a major buyout for the backshop that they had pretty much accepted," said Director of Publishing Systems Jim Bye, "so the clock was ticking."

Enter Quark Publishing System.

QPS, the workgroup publishing solution from Denver-based Quark Inc., satisfied two essential requirements: It ran on Macs, which were already installed throughout the newsroom, and it used XPress to build pages, so P.Ink and Press2Go training would not be wasted.

In February 1996, with a June deadline for pagination looming large, the Courier began bringing in QPS.

Unaffected by this turmoil was the evening Evansville Press, the locally-owned tenant in the host-tenant joint operating agreement (JOA) with the E.W. Scripps Co. of Cincinnati. In fact, the Press was still limping along on an Atex J-11 system when it died Dec. 31, 1998, upon the expiration of the JOA. The next day, the Evansville Courier & Press debuted (see NewsInc., March 29) and the Press newsroom was cleaned out, pending its renovation into space for accounting and the sports desk.

For the new 73,000-circulation newspaper with an ampersand, QPS remains the Pagination Platform That Could.

More than just a newspaper
The Evansville Courier Co. is a flexographic publishing powerhouse, pumping out hundreds of thousands of color preprints for customers across the Midwest.

On a tour of the two-story facility about 10 blocks from the Ohio River, whose flooding in 1937 first brought the Press and Courier together in a JOA, Publisher and President Vince Vawter pointed out the three sizes of paper rolls stacked to the ceiling in a back room near the two flexo presses, each with six units.

Flexo, he explained, gives great color, which is just what advertisers want. Ink companies drop off hundreds of gallons of their product, free, just to get feedback from a plant that is rarely idle -- and will now be able to schedule even longer runs with the Press gone.

Vawter manages a profit center capable of producing jobs on three web widths -- 48-inches, 50-inches and 54-inches (the Courier & Press uses the 50-inch width; the conversion from 54-inches occurred Jan. 1). The Courier Co. began selling commercial printing time three years ago, while also printing its own comics and television listings magazine.

The commercial printing environment has a direct effect on how the newspaper is produced.

"The commercial work has raised the level of our expectations tremendously," Bye explained, with the same color-savvy people using the same workflow and high-end equipment to produce pages for the Courier & Press and commercial customers.

Central to the operation is a desk that Bye described as unique, a traffic-control center -- staffed two shifts a day -- which directs pages to one of three output devices. All are Dolevs made by Scitex, the imaging systems supplier of choice since the building opened in 1991. One handles single pages, another can image doubletrucks, and a third is configured with both paper and film media.

Production workflow of newspaper ads and photos is unusual.

"We treat advertising a little differently here," Bye said. All ads are made up in XPress (still in version 3.32, because of conflicts with QPS), with each being made into a page-ready file in Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) format.

The ad office staff goes home at 5 p.m, he said, so "there's really only one deadline and that's 5 p.m., with an EPS on the server" for each scheduled ad.

Classified ads, which come from a PC-based Enterprise system made by Atex, pose two problems. Each liner is an EPS file, so "we really have to watch the negs" to make sure each ad is there, Bye said, and traffic through ad side's single ImageFlow Open Pre-press Interface (OPI) server, made by Cascade Systems Inc. of Andover, Mass., hurts network response times.

"When that thing kicks in," Kyle said of Enterprise output, "it slows our network down for about an hour. We've taken the Sun SPARCs as high as they can go." With the building wired for a 10BaseT Ethernet network, not the faster 100BaseT now in wider favor, the paper has opted to acquire a second OPI server.

Photos take two tracks to publication. Photographers still process film, although the purchase of three digital cameras is in this year's budget. They scan news photos into a Kodak scanner, then make a plain-paper print for layout purposes.

"That scan does not end up in the newspaper," Bye said. Instead, once a photo's dimensions are known, the negative is scanned into the Scitex system to within 20 percent of the final size and a high-resolution image is stored on a Scitex OPI server.

"That workflow has been around for 10 years," he said.

False starts pay off
The faltering steps taken with P.Ink and Press2Go allowed the company to walk briskly with QPS.

P.Ink installers and then I.M.A.G.E. Inc., an integrator based in New York City that installed QPS, asked that page flow be diagrammed.

"We started diagramming on a chalkboard and lines went everywhere," said Bye. "A system like P.Ink or QPS forces you to think through these things."

Questions about proofing, content workflow and the sequencing of pages to output led to a departure from directories, newsroom segmentation and linear processing inherent in Atex, the system the paper was leaving behind.

"We found we wanted our sports people to communicate with others in the newsroom," Michels said.

With QPS, "we've got two different workflows," said Bye, one for text editing, using the QPS Copy Desk module, and another for page assembly in the blessedly familiar XPress. The ability to switch back and forth between Copy Desk and XPress on one screen, plus the multi-user access to copy on a given page, are a dream come true for the copy desk.

Tom Steinkampt has seen many changes in his 27 years with the Courier Co. Once a sportswriter, he's been on the copy desk since 1990. He had a front-row seat as the paper moved from Linotypes to scanner-ready copy in the 1970s, then to its first system, from Digital Equipment Corp. of Nashua, N.H. (now a part of Houston-based Compaq Computer Corp.).

Like digital dominoes falling through the years, DEC gave way to Atex, P.Ink, Press2Go and QPS. "This is beautiful compared to the rest of them," he said of QPS. "It seems like the farther along we go, the more stable it is and we find more things to do with it."

Steinkampt was working at an ergonomically correct workstation, with his Macintosh 300-megahertz G3 and 20-inch monitor (the copy desk has Apple and Sony screens) sitting on a desk section that can be elevated separately from the keyboard support. A broad flat cushioned armrest protruded from the keyboard and formed a semi-circle around his waist, prompting him to note, "This is good if I don't gain any more weight."

The multi-layered desk is accompanied by a chair with multiple possible adjustments, "so whoever pulls up here can make it as comfortable as possible," he said.

Steinkampt described a night on the copy desk as a blend of traditional copy editing and page makeup.

"To be honest, you'd have to say you're spending more time on design than you did before," but he doesn't find fault with that because the inside pages he works on have a consistency to them that allows the system to give more than it takes.

A library of page elements lets him click and drag headline and body copy boxes to a page begun from a standing template in XPress, while Copy Desk provides a text-editing window with essential tools for copy editing a story in galley mode.

"One of the things that's great about Copy Desk is, you can note something out," Steinkampt said, clicking once to insert in copy a non-publishable note that starts with name, identifying the author, and the date and time.

Access to page layouts and individual stories is controlled by a check-in/check-out dialog box. While only one person may work on the layout at one time, each story may be opened independently for editing in Copy Desk -- and the page design can be altered in real time, with the appropriate editor getting a message on-screen when the geometry has been changed.

Overset text appears in a grayed-out area at the end of a story opened in Copy Desk, so pages can be worked on on deadline by as many people as are available, Steinkampt said.

Pointing to the paper dummy for an inside national news page he would lay out later in the evening, he said, "Because that's one of the later pages we do, we might gang up on that page" with two or three people diving in at once.

Section fronts are designed by people such as Randy Greenwell, a page designer and power user seated kitty-corner from Steinkampt. QPS, he said, is no different from working in Quark XPress, whose libraries of page elements, typographical style sheets and standing templates expedite getting his day under way.

On a light news day the pace will allow him to use standing elements, but when news breaks hot and heavy, "I'll go in free-hand."

Greenwell's screen is bordered by toolbars for two essential assistants -- QuicKeys and the QXTools XTension -- which have played into his hands nicely. QuicKeys is from CE Software Inc. of Des Moines, Iowa, while QXTools is from Extensis Corp. of Portland, Ore.

"I do a lot of stuff that's repetitive -- making proofs, collecting things for output -- that take a lot of steps," Greenwell said. "I'm basically a lazy person," so having a QuicKey to consolidate the steps for sending a page to the proofer saves energy, but more importantly, "It saves so much time it's amazing."

QXTools has expanded on some XPress features that Greenwell finds useful, such as providing character-level style sheets. And with access through toolbar buttons, he can zip in and out of XPress functions, such as clicking once to turn off the snap-to-grid function that XPress buries in a dialog box.

With all the snazzy time-savers available on-screen, and the ability to "collaborate" on pages so readily, Greenwell said one system function does go unused: messaging.

Speaking of the moments he has to communicate with the sports desk across the newsroom, he said, "a lot of the time, I can just stand up and say, 'Hey, Tim!'"

Not all sweetness and light
While the Courier & Press technical staff is generally pleased with QPS, unkind words are uttered about the company behind it.

As QPS is improved, Michels is looking forward to future enhancements that will allow more than 128 style sheets to be stored at the server level.

The style sheet limitation led to one of the more intricate solutions to getting agate into the paper, as Michels used FileMaker Pro as an engine to take in sports agate entries, then generate tables with XPress XTags embedded in them.

"That was a way around the problem," he said. "It's actually a little cleaner" than relying on a flock of style sheets to do the job. "When it works properly, and it generally works pretty well," he said, "it's been a good, quick tool for users."

With Qps 2.0 in the offing, the style sheet limit will rise into the thousands, and Bye, Kyle, Michels & Co. expect such things as the system hanging up spontaneously will go away. Their shop has nearly 100 Mac workstations in the newsroom, advertising and pre-press, so stability issues are critical.

Other annoyances remain to be eliminated. While QPS does assign status levels to copy and pages, it does not prevent a page marked "hold" from being output, Michels noted, something P.Ink did not allow. And Quark relies on a proprietary database, but will change to Oracle in Qps 2.0.

Shortly only G3s and iMacs will be in the newsroom, with reporters using the teardrop-shaped iMacs. "For a reporter, it would be perfect," Kyle said of the iMac, whose built-in monitor and price/performance ratio made it attractive to the Courier &Press.

While Apple still shines in their eyes, Bye's team is not particularly fond of Quark -- although they took pains to separate the QPS squad from the bigger enterprise. "Essentially," Michels said, "I think we've been treated fairly well."

But Quark as the supplier of XPress has garnered a different reputation. "I think it's a healthy venture for them," Bye said of XPress and its sizable penetration into the newspaper publishing market, "but they've gotten extremely cocky."

The old Courier had been a subscriber to Quark's Service Plus support program, but that changed abruptly in December 1997. Not only was a letter announcing changes in fees "unfriendly," Bye said, but a users group session with company President Fred Ebrahimi and Vice President Tim Gill went so badly, Scripps corporate decision-makers dumped Service Plus in favor of hourly support for XPress users. (The service contract for QPS support was not jettisoned.)

Another unfriendly approach taken by Quark concerns the use of AppleScript, which some newspapers such as The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore. (see The Cole Papers, October 1997) have found a godsend in creating time-shaving Macintosh-based macros.

"That's another arrogant thing they did," Bye said. "You can script XPress, but they wouldn't let you script QPS."

But in the end, the move to QPS was the right one -- for one thing, error messages no longer appear in German or Swedish. And having watched P.Ink and then Press2Go dissolve before their very eyes, Bye said, "We figured we couldn't kill Quark, so we went there."

-- Pete Wetmore

Atex Media Solutions Inc., (781) 275-2323, e-mail: info@atex.com
Cascade Systems Inc., (978) 749-7000, e-mail: info@cascadenet.com
CE Software Inc., (515) 221-1801, e-mail: sales@cesoft.com
Extensis Corp., (503) 274-2020, e-mail: info@extensis.com
I.M.A.G.E. Inc., (212) 843-8700, e-mail: image@image.inc
Quark Inc., (303) 894-8888, e-mail: quarktech@aol.com;
Scitex America Corp., (781) 275-5150, e-mail: paul_willis@sta.scitex.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.