Tharstern launches tool to 'teach' MIS how to lay down impositions

This will remove the need for pre-press to manually adjust or change the impositions sent down by the MIS, according to Tharstern.

Tharstern managing director Keith McMurtrie commented: ‘MIS-to-pre-press connectivity is pivotal to automation and while there have been great strides made in this area, it has still always felt like all of the knowledge was held in pre-press and the MIS was only sending a rough idea of the imposition layout for pre-press to interpret and make good. 

‘On the whole, that did work, but one of the challenges that has remained unconquerable in our opinion is change control. When pre-press make changes to an imposition, the integrity of the workflow is broken and feedback about job status and costing is nearly impossible. Some pre-press systems have gone a long way in trying to communicate this information back to the MIS but honestly, it’s typically too late or too difficult to flush that information into the relevant areas for each job. There are just too many implications.’

He continued: ‘The problem with automatic impositions created by an MIS solution, is that they follow industry standards and best practice, but each and every company we work with has so many variables and personal preferences that affect how they want to lay down their impositions, that we’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t an automatic one-size-fits-all way to do this. What people seem to want in an automatic production route is for the MIS to come up with the layout that they would have selected manually.’

With Layout Library, while the MIS will still create dynamic impositions automatically, there is now the added functionality to ‘teach’ the software about any exceptions to the rules. Printers can tell their MIS exactly how to lay down different products and different parts, and can control all the flipping and rotating of their signatures and sheets to fit in with their equipment and workflow. They can make allowances for non-printable regions for slow-down wheels, flex signature and sheet sizes automatically and also support variable cut-off cut-star type equipment.

These layout profiles are then assigned product types and criteria – substrate, run length, orientation and grain direction –  so the estimating engine within Tharstern knows which imposition to select for that product type and situation. The layouts can be associated with different equipment, so allowing one imposition for digital and one for litho, one imposition for a booklet maker and one for conventional binding. Different layouts for situations where the imposition needs to be different because of some other post-press process, such as die-cutting, can also be set.

Tharstern will be demonstrating Layout Library in a webinar on June 13 at 15:00 BST. Register for the webinar here.