Before the actual ‘print’ job starts, there are a number of steps involved right from receiving customers’ print orders to sending products for actual ‘printing’. Whether you offer a gift card, photo album, a photo calendar, or anything else; customers want their customization as per their specifications.

How it used to be before:
Therefore, deciding the printing method for a particular product, ensuring to meet all the specifications customers have laid down, and creating print-ready files without distortions is crucial. And these all activities constitute a ‘Pre-Press’ or ‘Pre-Printing’ job. Earlier when there was no digital printing, pre-press would be manual. It would start with designing rough sketches that a typesetter would use to include text within using an obsolete typesetting machine - Linotype. Following that, a photographer would photograph and edit images with traditional photographic procedures. A paste-up person would then add the text images on a paste-up board and the ‘stripper’ would take negatives, check them, and assemble everything into ‘flats’ or ‘sheets’. After imposing these ‘flats’ and setting an order they would be printed in, printers would turn these ‘imposed’ pages into plates for manual proofreading. Eventually, they would go to the printing press.

So, you can see that conventional prepress process would

Be too time-consuming

Be Prone to human errors

Lead to missed deadlines for order fulfillment

However, with the advent of technology, the generation of print-ready files is no longer manual and turned into an automated job. To find out how this advent of automation in pre-printing can benefit, keep reading.

Enhanced Quality
Generating print-ready files automatically helps improve quality. The reason is that there remains hardly any scope for print-related errors in alignment, size misfitting, or color distortions, etc. with pre-press automation. This results in the overall enhancement of the final printed products.

ZERO Manual Labor
With automation, you no longer need to manually monitor every single order in the background and generate print-ready files for them. Besides using automation to generate print-ready files including customer demands like vector, non-vector, or PDF files, etc.; you can also choose a printing method from predefined ones for a particular product and send the product straight to its designated printer. This won’t only eradicate the need for manual labor but also boost output.

To know about it more in detail, join this free webinar by Brush your Ideas:

Web Printing Automation: ZERO Manual Labor from Custom specifications to Multiple Printers

Cost-Effectiveness
Unlike the traditional pre-printing that would require a large number of employees, efforts and materials like films and plates, pre-printing automation saves you all this hassle. You can easily avail of desktop publishing, digital sketches, and easily editable print-ready digital files to produce printed products.

Therefore, the overall cost of pre-printing processes decreases significantly and they become budget-friendly.

Enhanced Speed
The automation of the pre-print processes helps reduce the turn-around times for the overall printing process significantly. With no need to manually check for the fulfillment of customers’ specifications for products, setting up plates and other machinery parts, or deciding print method and printer to assign for each product; As a result, the overall speed of the entire print job goes up.

Reduced Errors and Enhanced Accuracy
While managing pre-print processes manually, errors are very likely to creep in.

Whether it is manually checking for the specifications your customers have laid down for print-ready files, deciding on the printing method, or dispatching a print job to a particular printer, a ‘human’ can err. And a single error may lead to problems like delays, doubling of efforts in fixing errors, or even a complete product recall in case the error is too big to fix in run-time.

With auto-generated editable print-ready files available in various formats, you can always fix and remove errors in run time without having to start from scratch. This not only saves you from extra efforts but also increases the overall accuracy of the print workflow.

In a Nutshell
In the age of digital technology, relying on manual labor for pre-printing makes no sense. As it is neither cost-effective nor efficient and fast. Hence, it is high time you switched to automation.

Want to know how you can make your pre-print processes and boost your productivity and sales?

Click here to register for a free webinar on pre-press automation to be conducted by Brush Your Ideas, a popular W2P store solution provider company in Ahmedabad, India.