On the Quality of Data Management of the Publishers and Printers

The interface between publishers and printers is still under development to include the transmission of entire documents (jobs) and other data from the design stages to the mass production. The productivity of this stage, the publisher/printer interface, is critical in relation to the total cost and quality of the printed products. Some of the total quality aspects of this interface are analyzed in this paper. The earlier paper, at the TAGA '95 Conference in Orlando, April 1995, defined the concept of Press Frontend, a combination of receiver, storage and output systems for the printer. With this concept and setting systematic requirements for the product definition, process and resource data, the press frontend may become a strategic force for a competitive commercial printer. The requirements and proposed solutions must be related to the respective economic scale, from big web printing plants to the sheet-fed production and the new digital printing alternatives. Similarly, the publisher has his scale of operations which may set limits to the way the products are defined and which data management systems are applied.