Print & Display Printing House Chooses AC&C HSH Group Solutions

2005-06-10

Recently Print & Display, a Warsaw-based printing house, has invested in new equipment and software solutions. At the beginning of the year, a new large format printing press MAN Roland 900 XXL was installed. After that the company purchased Magnus VLF CtP system from Creo, controlled by Prinergy Evo workflow. The latest investment was PuzzleFlow Basic system and Imposition Pack software, both produced by a Polish company AC&C HSH Group.

Print & Display (Polska) company was established in 1994 and presently it is one of the biggest players on the large format poster printing market in Poland. For many years the company used offset and screen printing presses as well as traditional prepress equipment. In 2004 screen printing technology was replaced by digital printing and at the beginning of 2005 a new offset press was installed. Slawomir Koslicki, Operating Manager at Print & Displays says: After these investments our next natural move was to buy CtP system.

The company chose a thermal CtP system Magnus VLF from Creo. It was bundled with Prinergy Evo workflow and after a few weeks Print & Display managers bought next software solutions from AC&C HSH Group. These were the PuzzleFlow Basic workflow and the Imposition Pack package containing Imposition, BoxImposer, Tiler, AutoCrop and TwoSidePreview modules as well as processing Job Tickets.

We needed a tool that allows to split sheets fully and automatically into a standardized number of smaller pages – Slawomir Koslicki says. – Until that time we had had to split the image into a few smaller sheets and process every sheet as a separate job. PuzzleFlow allowed us to incorporate a simple and automatic function of splitting every sheet into parts (except one-sheet jobs, of course).

After verifying, splitting and saving the job as PDF file, imposition in Preps is made. At these stages the following data are defined: plate size, paper size and other pre-settings used in the printing and postpress part of production. After that PJTF files are produced, pre-settings of printing press are sent to the system (via CIP3 module) and a complete job is sent to CtP imagesetter.

Mr Koslicki underlines an important aspect of the installation made by AC&C HSH Group: We appreciated that the PuzzleFlow workflow could be easily incorporated into existing Prinergy Evo system.

Marek Pultorak, General Manager of Creo Poland, says: Print & Display is a very good example of successful co-operation of two well-constructed, PDF-based workflow systems. Functionality that had been achieved, helped in solving very specific problems of the customer. And if it all works without any system failures, it means that both vendors did a very good job.

Andrzej Czyz, partner in AC&C HSH Group company, adds: The PuzzleFlow system with an imposition package, including e.g. Tiler module, is a dedicated solution for printing houses specialized in billboard and poster production. We are very happy that our software has been chosen by the biggest player on the large format poster printing market in Poland.

Besides, the modules mentioned above, Print & Display also uses other “puzzles” of AC&C HSH Group system: Normalizer (converts incoming PS, TIFF, JPEG, EPS, DCS files into PDF format, verifies file settings), Recombiner (recombines separated PDF documents into composite jobs; spot color separations can be selectively recombined as spot colors or merged to CMYK components), PageOrienter (changes page orientation) and PageSelector (automatically changes the page order, selection, print sequence and number of copies in incoming job). All of these modules are parts of PuzzleFlow system. Slawomir Koslicki informs that at any time a license for new modules can be bought, using AC&C HSH Group Internet-based on-line support.