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Sunday, bloody Sunday: Like most newspaper supplements, the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Chronicle uses lots of large photographs that require tweaking for use in the PDF workflow that has been developed at the magazine. |
Sunday magazine shifts to PDF
one painful color issue at a time
It has had many names -- California Living, Image, San Francisco Examiner Sunday Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine -- but whatever it has been called, the Sunday magazine that has been delivered with the San Francisco newspaper on Sundays since the mid-1960s has always been on the cutting edge of technology.
Like most Sunday magazines of the era, California Living was an oversize (almost square) rotogravure product that required cold-type and paste-up during a time when newspapers were predominately produced in hot metal.
In its mid-'80s transformation into Image, a standard 8 1/2-by-11 heatset offset magazine, the Sunday offering in San Francisco pioneered a format change that was emulated around the country.
It was late in Image's life that it moved from traditional paste-up to desktop publishing. When the magazine was redesigned again in the mid-1990s, the magazine moved to what the Examiner's then-director of development Chris Gulker called a "distributed work model."
At that time the paper shifted from a traditional pre-press house to Digital Pre-press International (DPI) of San Francisco, led by desktop publishing pioneer Sanjay Sakhuja. The magazine, which was renamed last year when the staff of the Examiner merged with the staff of the Chronicle, had been produced up until that time pretty much as it had been for years.
What does all this have to do with Portable Document Format (PDF) workflow? Very little directly, but to understand the pitfalls and problems you run up against in real world implementations of any work procedure, it helps to have a little background to illuminate the perspective.
Bottom line: It's all about time and money. PDF workflow does save both, with the added bonus of a cross-platform format, data compression and archiving. But to have PDF workflow, you must have completely paginated pages. It's all got to be in place -- ads, artwork and copy -- and all correct technically as well as editorially.
As they say about Ben-Gay or Aspercreme, "Aye, there's the rub." Pages will not become PDFs if the Adobe Acrobat Distiller cannot render a page into PDF. Editorial errors will render quite nicely, but for problems with fonts and art, it's a bit more challenging.
I should explain how the current system at the Chronicle Magazine works, describe how we got to that system and detail the bumps along the way.
System now in place
Under the system now in place at the magazine, editorial copy is produced mostly on the legacy System/55 (aka Coyote) system that is now supported by Net-Linx Publishing Solutions of Ann Arbor, Mich., and Sacramento. Copy also comes in via the now-usual e-mail.
After editing, all copy ends up on a Macintosh connected to a production server, where it is flowed onto the Quark XPress pages and then fitted in with the photos and illustrations.
Each complete story or department (like Letters or Crossword) of the magazine is an XPress document. At first, only lower-resolution placeholder images are used, but after the layouts are finalized, the high-res scans and digital photos that have been properly color corrected by the photo department using Adobe Photoshop (of course) are placed into the document (usually I do that).
The final XPress pages with completed editorial content are then sent to DPI for proofing. DPI also receives the completed display ads and places them on the proper pages according to the ad map for that particular issue.
Those pages are proofed for a final read, necessary corrections are made and then the corrected XPress pages are sent to the magazine's printer, Treasure Chest Advertising Inc., which has a local plant in Sacramento.
The files sent to Treasure Chest are PDF files, which have been produced by DPI and then sent on to Sacramento (originally DPI shipped film to Treasure Chest). Using a PDF editing program -- PitStop, from Enfocus Software Inc. of San Mateo, Calif. -- these final PDF pages can be edited to a degree for certain kinds of last-minute type correction. But if major corrections were necessary, it would be necessary to remake the entire PDF page.
A change that will probably have taken place by the time this article is published concerns the making of the PDFs. Since DPI was -- correctly -- charging for the time it took to make the PDF pages and remaking them for the addition of late ads, that task is to be handled in-house by the Chronicle advertising department, with the Chronicle then shipping the PDF files to Sacramento.
From this, it becomes increasingly obvious that sooner rather than later, the entire production of the magazine will be taken in-house, with the help of Acrobat and Ad Layout System from Managing Editor Inc. of Jenkintown, Pa. The printing will continue to be done in Sacramento from PDF files.
Despite the cost savings realized by adopting a PDF workflow, management has announced that the Chronicle Magazine will become a bi-weekly starting Jan. 6. But I seem to be getting ahead of myself in this diary. Now we come to the part where I will try to explain, using actual issues from the magazine as diary entries, how the current system evolved.
April 29: The Chronicle Magazine changed editors and was redesigned. The budget was reexamined, the revenue stream was compared to the total cost of production and was found wanting -- i.e., money was being lost. So steps were taken to cut production costs. A newer scanner was purchased, with the bulk of the scanning now to be done in-house. The switch to PDF pages for Treasure Chest rather than film also was given the green light.
May 6: More photos were shot digitally or scanned in-house, and monitors had to be calibrated so we could all -- the magazine, Treasure Chest and DPI -- see the same thing. Calibration proved to be a laborious process. Color consistency and fidelity would prove to be the biggest hurdle to be overcome editorially.
On the advertising side, there was momentum for advertisers to be more digitally aware, with no more expensive stripping-in jobs to be done, as well as better digital preparation of ads before they were submitted to the PDF process. Font problems and photo formats would be the biggest bug-a-boos on the advertising side.
May 13: Photo problems persist. There is a brownish-green cast to many of the digital photos. DPI still is touching up some of the files in Photoshop, something the photo department will eventually be able to do.
The photo department, trained to make color separations for the daily paper's flexographic printing process, has had a slow early learning curve, mostly because of the lack of proper monitor calibration information and the time to get deep into Photoshop to adjust the settings that sometimes are hidden many dialogues deep in the program.
May 27: Not a good issue. The cover has a washed-out look, and many of the digital photos have that brownish-green cast. However, some of the smaller in-house scans are improved, as Photoshop's abilities are better utilized.
June 3: It's postulated, and later decided, that Chronicle Magazine assignments involving covers should always be shot on film. The digital files just don't look as sharp when sized at half a magazine page or greater.
June 24: The issue is improved. The problems with the brownish-green effect are succumbing to the proper calibration information, but all monitors (particularly mine) have not yet been properly calibrated.
July 8: The Dining issue: Many restaurant photos from the Chronicle digital library came out looking fine, after tweaking them in Photoshop to Chronicle Magazine specifications. We think we are getting on the right track.
July 29: Some good and bad in this issue. Good were the four-color and black-and-white photos of Oakland nights. DPI, the pre-press provider, still had to tweak some of the photos for that digital color cast problem.
With the new PDF process, the decision was made to use four-color Tagged-Image Format (TIF) files rather than the more traditional Digital Color Separation Encapsulated PostScript (DCS EPS) files, since the DCS EPS format (the Cymk separations plus a low-resolution place-holder) is unusable in PDF, and there is very little difference, size-wise, between a four-color DCS EPS file and a four-color TIF.
Aug. 12: Another strange amalgam of fine and not-so-fine photos. The decision is finalized that no magazine photos running larger than half-page will be shot digitally. That's because the digital cameras being used just don't have enough pixels at our resolution, 266 lines per inch (lpi).
Sept. 9: This issue makes it obvious the photo problems have been overcome, when you combine monitor calibration with the proper adjusting of the photos in Photoshop.
It's still sometimes a question of wrong resolution (newspaper vs. magazine) or TIFs that require large size reductions when placed in the allotted layout space. This causes increased raster image processing (RIP) time for the PDFs, because of the added calculation time for Acrobat Distiller to determine the proper image size for the PDF page.
Oct. 14: Calculations show that production costs on selected issues have fallen between 30 percent and 40 percent, as more advertising and editorial functions are handled in-house, but the print quality to some observers is not what it should be. Too much resolution is thought to be the culprit. PDFs will be better if everything is 240-lpi, rather than 266-lpi.
Nov. 11: Things get better. Whether in-house, digital or scanned, it seems like photo quality has finally come close to the standards before the PDF switchover. The photos are consistently sharp, no matter what the source.
Nov. 18: The Holiday Entertaining issue continues to have consistent photo reproduction; almost all of the advertisers were submitting proper digital files. Sometime in 2002, assuming another new high-end scanner is still in the budget, then total in-house PDF page production will happen.
Two other front-line players
I seem to have already answered the question of where the PDF workflow system is headed, but I think it would be proper to hear from two other front-line players.
First up is Sanford Shiu, who is a production artist at DPI and the chief producer of PDF pages for the Chronicle Magazine.
"We use Acrobat 4.0," he said, "because not all RIPs support the newer 5.0 standard. If the files are clean, a very large PostScript file can be processed into a PDF in five to 10 minutes."
Aside from Acrobat and its capabilities, "no other special software is used," Shiu continued, pronouncing DPI's system "half-way automated." But the combination catches all the errors, he added. With PDF, "we're all now working in a new way," he said.
Chronicle Newsroom Operations Manager Dave Hyams has a bottom-line slant on the process: "We went to PDF workflow for two key reasons -- cost and control."
Hyams said the paper recognized that the digital skills in-house had greatly increased over the years, so it could change the magazine's workflow.
"In fact," said Hyams, "we reduced the [overall] per-page cost by 25 percent by switching to Creo-Spectrum proofs for us and digital delivery to the printer; PDF is the quickest and easiest way to transfer the information to the printer.
"By sending the PDF ourselves, we skipped the step of sending late digital ads to the pre-press house; this gives us more control over the timing of the transfer. Arguably we've enhanced quality by eliminating the step of creating film for proofs, though this is more anecdotal than definable.
"So far, the plan is working."
-- George Powell, gp@colepapers.net
Digital Pre-press International,
(415) 216-0031;
Treasure Chest Advertising Inc.,
(916) 373-7530.
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