Hamburg, Germany – Agfa Graphics demonstrated the newest additions to the :Arkitex workflow management software suite designed to increase productivity, reduce costs, increase quality and provide a competitive edge in today's challenging market for Newspaper Printers and Publishers. Products include :Arkitex Portal, :Arkitex Director, :Arkitex Analyst, :Arkitex Vantage, Arkitex Intellitune and :Arkitex OptiInk.

:Arkitex Portal
:Arkitex Portal offers a cost-effective means to help newspapers and newspaper printers expand or develop their hybrid printing business. Customers can use :Arkitex Portal to upload pages which go through a sequence of printer-defined processing steps. :Arkitex Portal allows all participants throughout the project to collaborate on tasks within a 24/7-accessible web environment resulting in higher productivity, a shorter number of steps before printing, and reduced costs associated with reworks and errors. Online soft proofing helps lower costs and speed production. Flip-book soft-proofing ensures uploaded pages are properly recognised and positioned. :Arkitex Portal works in tandem with the rest of the :Arkitex family to ensure that pre-production data is accurately translated into production data. :Arkitex Portal also allows printers to offer value-added services, such as image improvement, without adding to their labour costs.

:Arkitex Director
As newspaper printers continue improving efficiency, lowering costs, and increasing their printing business they require additional tools to achieve their goals.

The new version of :Arkitex Director minimises waste materials through soft proof comparison. In the soft proof window, it highlights what has changed between page versions or between pages in different editions. Users view coloured highlights of the differences, or a toggle key "moves" the changed areas to make them more apparent. An advanced Fast Track feature allows the system to completely generate the plan from incoming page file names. The server can extract information such as publication dates; publication, edition, and zone names; section names, as well as page numbers and colour layers. Advanced Fast Track also supports imposition using reference plans that define the imposition scheme.

:Arkitex Director also allows users to include furniture that appears on the plate on any output they define: soft proof, hardcopy proof, or high-resolution output. Placing special furniture on the soft proof, such as alignment aids, ensures that page files provided by outside customers are correctly positioned on the plate before imaging.

:Arkitex Director  includes more flexible imposition, supporting impositions for 3- or 6-across plates or 6- and 12-across tabloid pages. The enhanced imposition also supports 3-around plates for new presses or press retrofits to a shorter cut-off. In each case the user can interactively layout plates and save this layout for future use.

This flexible imposition is also valuable when printing jobs on other presses where the plate needs to include a variable number of different sized pages.

:Arkitex Analyst
Improving efficiency also requires detailed information regarding the entire printing operation. Users throughout the organization require information not only highlighting what has happened but also information indicating where spare capacity may exist enabling expansion.

Many groups are now creating centralized toning centers using IntellituneX to improve images for many sites. :Arkitex Analyst provides more detail about IntellituneX file throughput such as number of files, incoming and outgoing file size, as well as processing time. This is important for groups creating "centralised toning centres" so they will know how much processing they are doing for each site.

Analyst options allow complete report automation meaning reports are in your e-mail in-box when they are needed without any manual running of the reports.

:Arkitex Vantage
:Arkitex Vantage tracks production systems to ensure production is moving smoothly but it also monitors imaging hardware to ensure quality printed products.

By monitoring the hardware – such as CTP and processor - it allows customers to identify potential quality issues before they occur. Vantage also helps to identify possible production bottlenecks early in production allowing early resolution avoiding missed deadlines.

:Arkitex OptiInk
:Arkitex OptiInk increases printing quality while reducing costs. The new version features Agfa's unique intelligent "Source Input Space Recognition" (SISR) to attain the most faithful colour reproduction even if the PDF is incorrectly separated and the profile is not known. The software's Advanced Colour Management results in maximum ink savings.

:Arkitex Intellitune
The newest version of :Arkitex IntelliTuneX features Adaptive Contrast Enhancement (ACE)-intelligent image processing capability. It achieves maximum quality even for difficult images with both bright highlights and dark shadows. It makes the minutest details easily visible.