At Esko booth 122, Esko offers printers new ways to work on print projects – and to expand their print businesses

Miamisburg, OH (USA), – At Print World Canada 2012, booth 122, Esko (www.esko.com) will demonstrate its extensive range of innovative solutions for packaging, sign & display, and commercial print providers. Held from November 17-19 at the Exhibition Place in downtown Toronto, Print World is one of the few printing trade shows to grow its presence in the industry. Over 8,000 graphic arts professionals/attendees visited the last show, Print World 2010.

Visitors will benefit from a visit to the Esko booth, where the company will display its end-to-end workflow solutions, showcasing its Suite 12 portfolio of print and packaging pre-production software, featuring Studio, a unique set of tools for 3D packaging design made specifically for packaging artwork professionals, and WebCenter communication and collaboration tools. For sign and display shops, Esko will focus on i-cut Suite, a collection of pre-production solutions that streamline the workflow for digital printing and finishing throughout the entire production process.

"In recent years, Esko has made its presence known in Canada, taking an active role in trade shows and offering print providers throughout the country easy access to our products and expertise. We have a very powerful message – the ability to dramatically improve productivity and, to commercial printers who are interested, an easy path to progress into other areas of print," explains Marc Raad, Esko Account Manager, Canada. "Esko has an extensive suite of new production and design tools – Suite 12 – that was launched earlier this year at drupa. We look forward to showing them to Print World attendees and answering all their questions on how to achieve the best possible results from their prepress production."

The most recent set of Esko workflow solutions for prepress
During Print World, a series of new solutions launched earlier this year will be demonstrated. Visitors can work with a wide array of software solutions addressing artwork, management, design and prepress, color management, workflow automation and process integration. Esko Suite 12 adds value for the user by introducing new productivity and efficiency benefits. This is done by closely integrating all flagship tools and engines, by adding rich 3D functionality for a holistic experience, and by enabling mobile collaboration and web-based packaging management.

Featuring WebCenter 12, Studio 12 Automation Engine 12, Color Engine 12 and the version 12 editions of flagship editors ArtiosCAD, PackEdge, ArtPro and DeskPack, Suite 12 raises the bar for process integration from design to press, involving all players in the supply chain. It provides a complete answer to the challenges of a modern packaging preproduction workflow.

Why work in a flat world if packaging isn't? Featured is Studio 12, a unique set of tools for 3D packaging design made specifically for packaging artwork professionals. Studio helps produce better artwork, by allowing users to virtually hold packs in their hands. Studio also lets companies create exciting 3D visuals to show to clients, ranging from PDF files with 3D content to movies, or virtual packshots. Meanwhile, Store Visualizer offers brand owners a unique, advance view of virtual packaging as it would look on a store's shelves next to competitive products - before the real packaging is even produced.

With the release of WebCenter 12, Esko responds to two distinct print and consumer trends. The first one is the proliferation of print variations driven by mass-customization and personalization. The second trend is the increased pressure on regulatory compliance, the need to accurately incorporate the required regulatory information on packaging and related materials.

WebCenter helps printers to address four challenges directly originating from these market trends:

1.    Keep every stakeholder informed: extending its capability to iPhones, and built-in integration with Automation Engine and ArtiosCAD
2.    Manage long approval cycles: enhanced compare capabilities, highlighting alterations by blinking or displaying the intensity of variation for easier detection and review. In addition, the Viewer allows real time collaboration on multiple pages.
3.    Manage the overall packaging process from design to shelf: Cascading fields offer smart filtering and auto filling, rich text fields to provide long briefs and pictorial labels that explain concepts visually. WebCenter 12 standardizes the overall project request, prevents errors and lost data and minimizes human intervention.
4.    Handle versioning: extended with user friendly and very powerful asset classification and search capabilities with a fully customizable graphical asset browser based on document metadata and custom attributes.

i-cut Suite, InterTech Technology Award recipient, highlights focus on wide format
Many print companies have successfully diversified to wide format. i-cut Suite lets companies that drive narrow or large format digital printers and/or digital finishing systems streamline their workflows. A 2012 InterTech Technology Award recipient, i-cut Suite has seen rapid popularity.

i-cut Suite components include:

i-cut Preflight handles efficient preflighting and editing of incoming PDF files, ensuring that jobs will RIP and print correctly. It also lets users make any corrections working within the PDF file.

i-cut Layout is a module to interactively build and edit sheet layouts, ensuring that jobs make the optimum use of the substrate through intelligent true shape nesting and tiling.

i-cut Vision Pro makes sure that die-less cutting contours match printed images perfectly. Often, slight distortions between printed graphics and contour cuts may cause unacceptable results. i-cut Vision Pro registers the actual dimensions and positions on the printed result.

With i-cut Automate, all of these functions are automated in a single workflow, with less operator intervention and fewer potential manual errors.

"We look forward to showing print providers at Print World how they can produce work more efficiently, while finding new, profitable services to offer," concludes Raad. "Our customer base is growing because we offer a wide range of ways to help redefine and grow their businesses."