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Open City: The Open Pre-press Interface (OPI) supports a workflow that takes high-resolution images from digital cameras and scanners and sends them to a server, which stores the files as well as making low-resolution For Position Only (FPO) versions, used in layout. The low-resolution version is swapped out when the page is sent to the imagesetter. |
OPI keeps its place in pre-press
despite gains in speed, file size
There's no technology like old technology that's fallen out of favor. Its advocates cling to it like lint on a flannel shirt, its detractors point their noses skyward and sniff, "Oh, that!"
On the face of it, the Open Pre-press Interface -- OPI, as it's familiarly known -- would appear to be a prime candidate for the technology hellbox. It was created more than a dozen years ago to solve a specific problem encountered in the early days of desktop publishing, that being the inability to shovel high-resolution image files around the production barnyard without quite a bit of sweat and not a little stink.
OPI's first iterations solved the twin problems of not enough speed and limited (costly) storage capacity by eliminating bottlenecks in the production workflow. It did so in two ways.
First, OPI isolated high-resolution Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files on their own server, so far down the production pipeline that they were snug up against final output. They were far removed from the high-traffic zones where page files of a more manageable size were swapped among workstations, and close enough to the imagesetters that data could almost jump into them unassisted.
Second, OPI performed a bit of sleight of hand: From each high-res EPS it automatically generated a corresponding low-res EPS, which it graciously made available for positioning on a page, often from another server altogether. Another name for these slim files was For Position Only (FPO), borrowing the term from paste-up days where a poor print would be cropped and placed on the page just to show the film assemblers the crop and placement.
Editors laying out pages called in FPOs willy-nilly -- literally, because in the days when 10-megabit-per-second transfer rates and workstations with processors that crawled more than they ran were the fastest generally available, an FPO would appear on-screen in an acceptable amount of time. No high-res need apply.
The really slick part, though, would come when that page was dispatched to the raster image processor (RIP) and on to the imagesetter. Embedded in the file were instructions tied to each image, detailing placement, sizing and crops. The OPI server slurped up each low-res, read the directions -- called OPI comments -- for it, then cropped, sized and positioned the high-res on the page and pushed it to the RIP.
The RIP fed the imagesetter, which made a negative for each color (cyan, magenta, yellow and black), and plates sooner than otherwise would be the case were on-press.
Flip the calendar ahead to today. What do you see?
Desktop computers have CPUs running 500 megahertz-plus -- 10 times or more faster than in the early days of OPI. Networks provide file transfer rates of 1 gigabyte -- 100 times faster than 10base-T.
RIPs process four-color pages in half the time it took to do one monochrome page Way Back Then. Hard drives with 10 gigabytes or more sit on every reporter's desk; photo staffs have even more disk space because it's so affordable.
What else do you see? OPI.
While the bottlenecks unchoked by OPI no longer exist in some shops, new factors have renewed OPI's lease on life. They include exponential growth in the use of color, the need to manage color output with speed and precision, and the proliferation of multiple printing sites where -- guess what? -- getting those fat files from the hayrack to the feed trough still stresses out the barnyard crew.
OPI: Like fashion, cars and music, what's old is new, all over again.
No longer waiting in Wenatchee
"We really, really, really wanted to do it," said Stephen Schroeder, production director of the 28,000-circulation Wenatchee World in central Washington state.
He was speaking of 1995. Limits on capital spending prevented Schroeder from acquiring OPI at a time it would have speeded production. Now, he considers it unnecessary, thanks to gigabit Ethernet and the overall demands of his paper, which he acknowledged are far less rigorous than a major metro.
"Why do you need it now? In our environment, if you can build the streets wide enough and you don't have that many cars, it's just not an issue," he said. Even with triple the amount of color in his newspaper compared to six years ago, Schroeder said. "it just hasn't been necessary."
Schroeder has numerous "workarounds" to deal with issues that OPI might address for him. Color quality control is in the hands of "a limited staff." With the volume of pages to be done, there's no need to generate FPOs, and high-res images can be called in so fast now they can be worked with directly. And hot folders hand off files as needed to control workflow.
Schroeder represents the camp followers who don't see OPI as a necessity, particularly as the use of those compact Portable Document Format (PDF) files proliferates (see previous stories). The volume of color can be handled adequately by his staff and the technology at their disposal. He doesn't see the need to invest in what he terms "one more thing to maintain."
"If you've already paid it off, it would be nice a tool to have in your arsenal," he said. "If you're going shopping, I just don't see where OPI would make a priority list at a paper our size."
Go south to California and you'll find Joe Luper. He's invested in OPI, and for good reason. Without it, Luper said, "our networks just came to a grinding halt." Luper is production manager for pre-press and print quality at the 98,800-circulation Ventura County Star in the greater Los Angeles area.
The Star has upgraded portions of its networks to 100base-T, Luper said, making it easier to shuffle about some graphics files that can hit 200 megabytes in size. But OPI's file-swapping service remains essential for Luper: "Just the time you would tie up that workstation just downloading that PostScript file could be 10 minutes to half an hour. That's just not feasible at all."
Luper's OPI configuration includes software from Autologic Information International Inc. (AII) of Thousand Oaks, Calif., which is in the process of being acquired by Agfa Corp. Five AII RIPs drive only two Aii 3850 Sierra imagesetters, so the load-balancing aspects of OPI -- an enhancement to the original OPI concept -- is "integral" to managing peak demand.
The Star outputs an average of 200 files a night, with the figure rising to 900 files over 12 hours on Friday night. "That's our peak, that's when our imagesetters are really maxed, our systems are really maxed," Luper said. To open up bottlenecks, the Star employs 100base-T workflow "in some key areas."
Texas-sized servers
Scaling up even farther from Wenatchee, the people who manage color production -- as well as all advertising production -- for the Houston Chronicle swear by OPI.
"Traditionally, OPI, for lack of a better word, is a workflow we continue to employ heavily to bridge the gaps that might have once been there in Department A building the ads, Department B taking in the ads and Department C spitting it all out," said Bill Blackwood, vice president of newspaper services for American Color Graphics Inc. of Brentwood, Tenn.
American Color oversees on-site operations that include ad creation as well as managing pre-press ad workflow on deadline. Blackwood relies on OPI to expedite production because it generates more compact PostScript files to send to the RIP, speeding throughput and reducing the chance for error (although thoroughly pre-flighting files to check that they are complete for output is a task handled by software other than OPI).
The operation has discarded one tool from the early versions of OPI, the creation of Digital Color Separations (DCS). Each Cymk file would be separated into four files, one for each color. This saved time on output, Production Manager Duane Terry said -- the processor could "chew the pieces up in four separate bites."
But if one separation file became corrupt, the process would have to be rerun. Each separation was as big as the original file, eating space. And the task of color trapping -- to ensure that touching colors just touch and don't overlap -- was more difficult because trapping would be applied at the RIP with color files in isolation from one another.
Now, composite color is becoming the norm. A single file containing all the color information is sent to the RIP, where Cymk are extracted and trapping is more definitive, Terry said.
At the Star, where the Rips are configured to accept and interpret composite color, Luper has found one kink. "It's fine and it isn't," he said, "because some PostScript errors don't show up until you run color in separation mode." To contend with that, the paper is examining digital soft proofing, where separated files are combined into a composite color file which is fed to a color-calibrated monitor to show possible OPI failures or font errors.
Both American Color and the Star are sticking with OPI. Said Blackwood: "While there are new tools to handle larger files, now is not the time to hang up on it."
For Luper, the issue is cost: "What's the overriding demand that's going to drive us to invest in fiber and faster hubs? We don't see the need right now."
To OPI or not to OPI
As you'd expect, suppliers of publishing tools have their own views on OPI, but they bow to one overriding factor -- the customer. The production needs of a particular newspaper can dictate whether OPI should be given a seat at the table.
One provider of OPI systems, ScenicSoft Inc. of Lynnwood, Wash., points to changes in the production environment as favoring OPI. "What we're seeing now is that you can do OPI in different ways," said Bert van Hoof, vice president of engineering.
The increased use of wide area networks (WANs) actually argues for OPI, he said. Large volumes of traffic traveling between locations miles apart creates a situation in which "all of a sudden, you're back to a link that's actually slower than your old LocalTalk connection" on nascent Apple Macintosh systems. OPI's low-res file swapping helps balance the load.
Advertising puts particular demands on a system, van Hoof said, with many ads still being delivered already separated. The advent of CopyDot scanning technology, which digitizes reflective copy that's already been screened for reproduction, has put another load on production that OPI is well suited to handle. "These are huge files," van Hoof said, running up to 100 megabytes. "Placing those is a nightmare if you have to bounce them around your network."
PDFs raise the spectre of another potential nightmare. One advertiser distributes a multiple-page PDF containing all the ads for all the papers in which it's advertising -- maybe 200 in one file, said Tom Hallinan, the U.S.-based strategic partner manager for Helios Software GmbH of Garbsen, Germany.
Helios has software that "will explode that PDF into separate files," Hallinan said, then create low-res files from which the proper one is selected. Thus the advertiser can efficiently broadcast its ads while each receiving newspaper can let technology do the drudge work.
Increased workstation storage coupled with higher transfer rates has increased the use of high-resolution files directly by users, especially in the ad alley, where seeing detail in an image and the ability to resize a file on demand are essential. This would seem to argue against OPI and its FPOs, but one configuration calls on using two high-res files -- one on the workstation, to allow easy viewing of fine detail in an image, and a second on an OPI server.
On output, the operator declares "omit TIF" or "omit EPS" in the page layout application; the page file moves on, complete with OPI comments, while the user's high-res file never budges.
A second configuration is predicated on a high-speed link between a server and workstation so that a file is opened on the server into the workstation's random access memory (RAM), but not downloaded to disk. That high-res file still may go through the rest of the OPI routine in what's dubbed "hybrid OPI."
Kenn Morrison, president of Morcor Solutions Inc. of Napanee, Ontario, points to the San Diego Union-Tribune, where his company installed its Xpance ad-tracking software.
"They were bent on using OPI for their images," he said. In an environment with seven remote sites but many 100-base-T links, "we proved to them they didn't need it" at those points in production -- but "they're using OPI at their site to pass our finished files for pagination."
One publishing systems supplier, SAXoTech Inc. of Denmark, can turn OPI on or off. By switching back and forth, it can gauge how fast files move through the workflow. "We get the real-world impacts of not having OPI in place," said Jeff Hoffman, vice president for customer fulfillment at the U.S. subsidiary based in Rockville, Md. This helps determine whether OPI should be built into a system or not.
In the end, said Hoffman, the customer's mix of hardware -- the speed and capacity of workstations, the network, RIPs and imaging devices -- combined with the page count, the amount of color being printed, and whether machines or people are to be given control over color management, all have to be weighed before giving OPI either the high-five, or the boot.
-- Pete Wetmore, pw@colepapers.net
American Color Graphics,
(615) 377-7500,
e-mail: info@amcg.com;
Autologic Information International Inc.,
(805) 498-9611,
e-mail: rmedina@autoiii.com;
HELIOS Software GmbH,
{011} (49) 5131 709320,
e-mail: marketing@helios.de;
Morcor Solutions Inc.,
(613) 354-2912;
SAXoTECH Inc.,
(301) 294-0805,
e-mail: info@saxotech.com;
ScenicSoft Inc.,
(425) 355-6655,
e-mail: info@scenicsoft.com.
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