Montreal, Canada, April 29th 2004 Ultimate Technographics Inc, the leading imposition software developer and the inventor of digital imposition announces the world preview at DRUPA of Impostrip Plate Ready, a universal tool for printers to control inking information for their printing presses. Impostrip Plate Ready features: • Takes in any PDF, PostScript or Tiff/IT plate data and produces the ink zone information for any printing press. This is for printers who do not have ink control units on their presses that can take in CIP4 data for ink key settings. The information is shown on screen in color, separated or composite, or can be printed as a PDF file and attached to a job bag. • Takes in any CIP4 PPF or JDF file that contains the ink preview and lets the user see the preview on screen to verify if it matches the job that is going to be run on press. The plate ink data can be viewed as separations or as a composite and can be printed to a printer as a low resolution proof for press operators to verify that the file matches the plates they are putting on press.  Also will produce ink zone settings for the press that cannot take in CIP4 data. • Takes in any PDF, PostScript or Tiff/IT plate file and produces CIP4 PPF or JDF with the ink preview when the printer has a press console that can accept this data. • Converts a CIP4 PPF ink preview data to JDF or JDF to PPF. This is for printers who may only have a PPF interface for their press, but the ink data is in JDF from the prepress department. • Exports overall plate and job ink usage to be used in an estimating/costing MIS system. In addition to all these features, Impostrip Plate Ready is also a powerful plate assembly tool that allows the printer to take in any PDF, PostScript or Tiff/It pages or page elements and place them visually and accurately anywhere on the printing plate. This can be seen on the screen much like it could be on a light table in the days of manual assembly. The pages can be cropped, rotated and snapped to a grid. If the page is two sided, both sides are aligned properly and the user can see the reverse side in a transparency on the screen to verify two sided placement.   Impostrip Plate Ready can import signatures from imposition software like Impostrip, or others, and the user can gang other pages or elements on a common plate and output it to a CTP machine and produce the ink data the way it is useful in the printer’s plant.   “The advent of digitally linking prepress and press is here,” explains David Watson, President and CEO of Ultimate, “but it has been too often made an adjunct of a particular workflow and has not been offered to printers as a universal tool that can meet their needs, no matter what press equipment they have, and no matter what the source of the plate data. For every printer that has a sophisticated integrated workflow system from prepress to press there are thousands who do not. They may be making their plates in QuarkXPress, have an old imagesetter that does not have a modern RIP with CIP4 and a printing press that has a console to adjust the ink settings manually, or even a press he still manually turns the keys on. Impostrip Plate Ready meets that printers needs, as it does the printer that has a mix of equipment and workflows but wants a simple universal means to control his ink data and a means to assemble a plate that a traditional stripper can understand.”   Impostrip Plate Ready will be shown at DRUPA and will be shipping to customers by the end of the summer. It requires a Windows XP, 2000 or 2003 PC.   See Ultimate at Drupa, located in Hall 9 Stand D-59