A clear focus
Tecniche Nuove was founded in Milan in 1960 by publishing specialized magazines. Today’s numbers are dazzling: with 80 specialized magazines and 570.000 monthly copies Tecniche Nuove is leader in the field of industrial information.
Marcello Oddini is in charge of IT at Tecniche Nuove and he is editor-in-chief of Italia Grafica, one of Tecniche Nuove’s professional magazines directed to printers. In this function he has quite some knowledge about prepress and preflighting and was chosen to start up the automation project based on PowerSwitch, a product he was able to evaluate when it was first launched in Italy.
Reducing time-to-market
“We produce 80 magazines, 7000 pages a month,” says Marcello Oddini, “everything that can be done to reduce production time is just essential for us.” In the prepress department, PowerSwitch manages PDF files in the different production stages of the magazines. With some differences depending on the stage – first draft, second draft, final version - high-res PDFs are printed – copying them to the Fiery RIP hotfolders – preflighted and a medium-res version for the Web is produced.
Booklets are generated assembling single pages into a PDF (groups of 16 pages), reordered to get the right sequence for booklet printing, adding blank pages if missing in the sequence. An independent workflow for images enlarge them depending on the original size and makes color optimization.
Applications involved are Adobe Acrobat, Enfocus Pitstop Server, and ImageMagick for file information.
Open architecture
“What is important for us is flexibility, the ability to use the best application for every task and of course the ease of development,” summarizes Marcello Oddini. “We would like to become independent in development and PowerSwitch is very easy to learn. It only took a couple of months to be able to make quite complex flows.”
Speed
“The main benefit is speed. PowerSwitch manages the flow of the files through the folders, the real operations are done by other applications. We do not need powerful servers and it is absolutely easy to install, manage and upgrade the system. You can integrate applications that have already proven their value.” says Marcello Oddini.
Easy decision
“Another big advantage is the pricing. The price for acquisition and maintenance is not too high. It’s something you can easily decide to buy, it just doesn’t need a long decision process.” concludes Marcello Oddini.