Why would ABT Media Group rely on best-of-breed prepress solutions?

ABT Räume Details No2

ABT Mediengruppe, an expert in sustainable media communication in digital and print for medium-sized businesses with headquarters in Weinheim in the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region, employs around 50 people. Each year, the company produces around 4,500 'print jobs', all ranging from business cards, catalogs with several 100 pages, flyers in variable quantities, to large-format posters. To ensure that the associated PDF files are reliably processed, the family-run company introduced callas pdfToolbox back in 2006 and Enfocus Switch in 2012. While Enfocus Switch handles the data handling, pdfToolbox ensures that the PDF files are structured without errors and thus achieve the desired print result. As part of the processing procedure, Enfocus Switch passes incoming print data to pdfToolbox, which checks it for resolution, color spaces and fonts, as well as dimensions, and then corrects it. Switch in turn makes the results available in predefined folders - one for files without error messages and one for files with error messages or warnings. If it is not possible for pdfToolbox to correct the errors on its own, the employees of the ABT Media Group are helped by corresponding instructions from the callas solution to then correct these errors manually.

"Like other companies, we were confronted with the fact that print runs are falling. In order to keep the volume high and thus work economically, we were challenged to process more jobs with the available resources."

For the company to achieve this goal, prepress processes needed to be as uninterrupted as possible and with least manual intervention. When evaluating suitable solutions, ABT was faced with the decision of whether to implement a closed system from one supplier or products from several manufacturers. One major reason to go down the multi-product route was the flexibility and openness to integrate further products in order to be able to cover future requirements.

calibrate GmbH, a partner at eye level then recommended that the existing products could be expanded to include the in-house MasterProfile, the Krause Imposition Manager and the Impressed Workflow Server (IWS). The calibrate MasterProfile is a variable extension of pdfToolbox, with which all presets including possible variables are uniformly described in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format in a file. The associated advantage is that instead of different setting files, only one dynamically controllable file is used, which of course massively simplifies handling.

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