Centralia, WA - The Chronicle Printing Division of Lafromboise Newspaper Inc. recently upgraded their prepress workflow to achieve greater production efficiencies and quality control in plate production and in the pressroom by installing Workflow ESP from Fusion Systems International.

The Chronicle newspaper is printed daily (M-S), along with the Nisqually Valley News, and Southwest Washington Family and a wide range of commercial work on both cold-set WEB and a sheet-fed presses.

Chronicle Printing has been running computer-to-plate imaging for several years and needed to replace their existing Panther RIPs with a modern workflow. The new ROOM workflow system provides inline pre-flighting and file correction, advanced file format processing, post-RIP soft-proofing, automated post-RIP imposition and more.

The system also provides internet based soft-proofing and approval capabilities along with new quality control tools for plating across both the newspaper and commercial printing operations.

The Chronicle's newspaper production facility is located in downtown Centralia, WA and the Chronicle Printing Division production facility is across town. Production efficiencies have also resulted from the central publishing facility's new ability to print layout and design files directly to the Fusion Systems workflow server, located across town, over a dedicated network connection.

"Being able to print directly out of InDesign to the prepress workflow, across town, and automatically get back post-RIP PDF proofs in the web-browser interface has been a huge time saver."  - Doug Branson, Prepress Systems Manager at Chronicle Printing

This press-accurate proofing and approval capability has reduced production time by eliminating the need to first distill pages to PDF or .eps formats prior to sending files over to the prepress and printing facility for imposition and plating. 

As soon as files are received they are processed on a page by page basis, and press-accurate proofs are automatically posted in the new internet based Publication Proofing System. Page proofs automatically flow by publication name, date, section and page number into the system and are immediately available for viewing via a secure login.  Both internal and external client can view their own page proofs quickly and easily, using common internet browsers.

"Everyone loves the ability to quickly proof their work from anywhere on the internet and the ability to control quality and approval," states Branson.

As page proofs are approved, they are automatically forwarded and placed into imposition and page pairing templates for direct output to plating.  Additional high resolution soft-proofing and hard copy proofing tools are now in place as well to ensure perfect plating.

All adjustments for offsets and fan-out, if necessary, are applied automatically along with all standard or custom plate marks. In the press room the new workflow accelerates make-ready and improves registration by making digital adjustments to automatically correct for web-growth and fan-out issues.

"The new system's ability to digitally morph a color separation prior to plating to correct for web-stretch, so that registration is right where it needs on the press is a beautiful thing." proclaims Web Press Manager Tom Thunell. This has proven to provide faster make-ready on the web press to reduce material waste, with precision results.