Prinergy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it. Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. (November 2006)

This article does not cite any references or sources. (September 2006) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Prinergy is a prepress workflow system created by Creo and currently maintained and sold through Kodak. It is a client/server system that integrates PDF creation, job proofing, imposition, and a Raster Image Processor (RIP) into one unified workflow.

History of Prinergy Creo was the leading manufacturer of computer-to-plate technology in the 1990s, using thermal laser technology to capture a significant market share of the offset prepress industry. Because computer to plate technology allowed printers to image large numbers of plates at great speed, there arose a corresponding need to engineer a workflow that could process large amounts of data to feed the platemakers and ultimately the offset presses.

Prinergy was first conceived under the codename Araxi, which was taken from the name of a restaurant based in Whistler ski resort. Amos Michelson commissioned Judi Hess to lead the project, with such Creo notables as Dave Kauffman and Stan Coleman acting as product and project manager respectively. Jim Firstbrook was the original project engineer. The project was conceived and funding was granted in 1996. In 1998, Heidelberg was brought aboard as a partner and contributed critical pieces of technology to the project, specifically the color management and trapping algorithms.

Prinergy Function The Prinergy system was designed from the ground up to automatically perform all functions on the data that are necessary to get a PDF "ready" for the press. The PDF is first processed (normalized) with sanity checks to ensure it will not choke the RIP at later stages. Then it is color-managed, meaning that the necessary color look-up charts are attached to images and text. Then it is "trapped," or where colors join in a document, a slight overlap is created so that white space does not show on printing.

After the PDF is processed into the system, the operator has the option of a number of choices including sending single pages out to a proofer or impose the pages into a signature for platemaking.

Virtually all the large offset printers of the world (RRD, Quebecor, Mohnmedia, Quad Graphics) uses Prinergy as their central workflow management system. Specifically, the telephone directory printers can process ten of thousands of pages through a single Prinergy system every day.

All files and jobs are stored in an Oracle database so Prinergy has archival and retrieving capabilities.