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Not just any system: The Anygraaf JobPlanner watches all the elements on all the pages and keeps managers in contact with the progress of production. |
New thoroughbred hits U.S.
market with full product line
LAS VEGAS -- Like Seabiscuit, the famous racehorse, Anygraaf USA Inc. of Gaithersburg, Md., is small now, but with a winning attitude.
Until a book was published in 2001, little was remembered about this horse that electrified the nation in 1938 by becoming Horse of the Year.
Until Anygraaf came to NEXPO in 2003, little was known about this North American subsidiary of Anygraaf Oy of Vantaa, Finland, a company owned by its employees. Founded in 1996 by the personnel from Siemens Nixdorf's graphics software development group, a Swedish subsidiary, Anygraaf Ab, was started two years later. Anygraaf USA sprang to life in 2001, the same year Seabiscuit: An American Legend became a hot book.
Well, the Seabiscuit movie is in theaters as you read this, and Anygraaf USA is showing why it may have a leg up on the competition with Doris, Eddie and Monica.
Doris32 is the asset management and publishing production system, Eddie is the SGML /XML text editor that works with the layout program (not to worry, you can also use Microsoft Word) and Monica monitors (sure sounds like it should) directories for changes, as in the queue of a printer's RIP.
This is one integrated system, with clients running anything from Windows 95 or Macintosh OS 7 (these might not be the best of choices, since the hardware minimum is a Pentium III or Macintosh G3) right up through Windows XP or Mac OS X.
So Anygraaf is pretty system agnostic. The database should be Oracle, Microsoft SQL server, Informix, Sybase or Microsoft Access, and the server can be running Windows NT or 2000 Server, UNIX or Novell. I would think it might run better on some combinations than others, but the entire breadth of Doris seems very well thought out and then realized.
Now for ads and ad management, stick AProfit alongside Doris, and you have a complete system. The hardware, software and server requirements for AProfit are identical with Doris, with the exception of ad statistics and reporting, which can only be done on a Windows-based machine.
Once again on the ad side, you get all-in-one management, with hooks into all the popular ad design tools: Quark XPress, Adobe's InDesign and Illustrator, MultiAd Creator and even CorelDraw and Macromedia Freehand.
Plan, place, invoice, generate reports, store customer information, track payments, track and place display and classified ads, generate on-line ad proofs, on-line approvals and actual Internet ad publishing and then automatically archive dated material.
So Anygraaf President Andy Hunn has a lot to smile about, just from AProfit. A gregarious guy who was just as full of enthusiasm for his products on the last day of NEXPO as he was the first (I assume), he continually stressed the integrated nature of the total Anygraaf publishing solution.
Doris32 can do all the usual integrated things, handling a wide variety of file formats, taking advantage of SGML tagging of story elements to "write once, publish many" the golden repurposing mantra of many a 21st century publisher. Quark XPress or InDesign, paginate away. The XTension or Plug-in is there, along with drag-and-drop support right from Doris, along with layout templates that make things happily simplified. The XTension and Plug-in can also place display and classified ads on the pages.
And that's not the half of it: This ePaper electronic publishing takes the Postscript and PDF newspaper pages already produced and makes an exact replica of the printed page, including the ads. It's slick, fast and familiar, and the same paper ads appear electronically. One click on any element of a page and the reader can view it separately.
And there's still more: Doris also gives its users a PageComposer, that will support imposition and page-pair output for a press, taking individual EPS page files and combining them in to the proper plate configuration. Doris also has a Proofing System, that allows viewing of RIPed pages from a browser, through the Planner part of Doris or directly from page views.
That Planner monitors the status of every page, can interface with third-party ad management systems as well as Anygraaf's AProfit to automate placement of all ads. As previously mentioned, these pages can be either in XPress or InDesign.
And finally Doris provides a Job Planner to handle that pesky task of newsroom scheduling into the total integrated package. It can be a stand-alone system, and some newspapers without one of these may just want to check this feature out. Puzzled staffers can use a browser to check their schedule in case they have questions, a handy feature for harried news and copy desks.
That's quite a gallop around the production track. Anygraaf does it with a lot of surprising power and first-class features, just like that famous Seabiscuit. This newcomer just might NEXPO 2003's best of breed.
-- George Powell, e-mail: gp@colepapers.net
Anygraaf USA Inc.,
(301) 926-1805,
e-mail: anyinc@anygraaf.com.
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