Industry’s powerful media production automation software is given considerable speed, versatile image support, and new automation tools to make operation of workflows even easier

Kehl, Germany – DALIM SOFTWARE, makers of highly efficient, scalable software solutions for the creation, production and management of cross-media content, announces the launch of TWIST 7, a major update of its popular and long-standing production automation software. TWIST 7 will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at booth 4245 during Print 2013 September 8-12 at McCormick Place in Chicago. It will also be shown at ProFlex, September 10-11 in Stuttgart, Germany; dmexco booth Hall 6/C01, September 18-19 in Cologne, Germany; LabelExpo booth 9G72 September 24-27 in Brussels, Belgium; and the World Publishing Expo 2013 (IFRA Expo) booth 4.2.325, October 7-9 in Berlin, Germany.

Some of the industry’s most recognizable companies use TWIST to achieve high throughput, reliability and flexibility in demanding content production environments. They gain significant performance with features such as the ability to build an almost infinite variety of processing paths; a very extensive modular feature set; and automation of repetitive tasks such as preflighting, file optimization and conversion, color management, and trapping, to name a few. With its association with noted industry organizations such as GWG, Fogra and IDEAlliance, plus its strategic partnerships with many vendors, DALIM SOFTWARE ensures that the quality of produced files exceeds industry standards.

Many new improvements and features keep TWIST 7 as the industry leader in high-power production automation

TWIST has a number of new features that help automation, prevent file errors, and enhance speed. For productivity, TWIST 7 provides speed improvements of up to a factor of four.

TWIST has always been able to receive files by hot folder or Web upload. TWIST 7 is able to monitor FTP servers and also receive files via email, making it easier for printers and media service providers to receive customer files, along with the usual hot folder and WEBLINK support. It extends its powerful metadata handling abilities. It can collect any email message content as metadata—such as the senders’ and recipients’ email addresses, the email subject, and text within the message (for example, signatures)—to dynamically drive a workflow. For example, metadata picked up within the text of a message can be used as a ‘trigger’ to automatically notify a sales rep, send preflight reports, or be programmed for other tasks.  

Some of the biggest improvements in TWIST 7 are the options to improve the image workflow—of particular help to agencies and for digital asset management systems. The new ImageAction tool can create and convert a multitude of image files, along with layer support. It can produce several different versions of one image for print, a preview, the web, etc., on the fly. Automated actions include cropping, scaling, rotation, change of resolution, and file format changes. Support for BigTIFF (>4GB), makes it easier to handle large files for point of sale and sign applications—such as those produced by TWIST for the London Olympics.

Making better comparisons

The TWIST 7 VisualCompare tool offers ‘lights out’ quality control, identifying the rare file that should not have passed an otherwise tedious and lengthy quality control process. It can compare a customer’s original, incoming file to the final, print-ready version, to check if any unintended artifacts were introduced during production. It can also compare the plate output of two different RIPping technologies (Adobe PDF Print Engine vs. Harlequin, for example), to identify potential differences in RIP interpretation before the job is printed. It is also possible to automatically identify and compare a single reference document (for example, a single page or packaging label) with the same file on a complete imposed or nested form. This way, the user can easily identify issues introduced during any given part of the process.

In addition to many improvements of TWIST’s individual workflow tools like AutoTrap, database connectivity and preflight reporting, the MergeXP tool has been updated for greater support when adding printers’ marks on multi-page documents. Color bars, page numbering, cropping, etc. can be applied to PDF files directly, without splitting them into single pages.

“About twenty years ago, TWIST was the first workflow aimed at the print, packaging and media industries to deliver an intuitive graphical interface to connect production tasks. Today, often copied but never equaled, it continues to serve the industry’s power users—print service providers and content creators alike—who need an extraordinarily reliable workflow system to process an exceptional number of files while maintaining impeccable quality, regardless of any change in output devices or presses,” comments Dr. Carol Werlé, DALIM SOFTWARE CEO. “THEMAGAZINE, our own publication available at our booth or on our website, offers a number of examples of our customers use TWIST to resolve complicated production challenges. We feel that TWIST 7, with its significant versatility, speed, reliability and innovative automation tools, still sets the bar for production automation systems.”