ApogeeX: Huge Impositions; and DeviceN from Quark 6.x

[CollyWolly]

Have two questions which concern Apogee X workflow which I am hoping someone can answer for me.

1) After having the latest patch installed on the Apogee X client & server, have noticed that impositions seem to take a long time. it is getting to the point where to perform an imposition a book needs to be broken down into blocks of 10.

One book in particular was 65 sections (2088 pgs). Unfortunately, the customer only supplied the pages for the first 32 sections, so one ticket was made for the first 32 sections, and then once the remaining pages came in, a separate ticket was made but was 65 sections long with the pages in the first 32 sections being blank (i.e. so that the section marks on the layouts would still reflect the appropriate section numbers). the first 32 section layout took AGES to process just to get to the imposition TP. The second ticket appears to have failed (even after several attempts from new tickets). just sits on the server peaking out the performance monitor.

Has anyone had a similar experience or can offer any advice which may help the TPs go faster?

2) In Quark 4.x & 5.x when sending to normaliser, Quark had to have a AGFA CTiff xtension installed to cope with colorised greyscales within Quark, otherwise the tiffs would become CMYK in the resulting PDF.

To compensate for this, Quark (in 6.x) created the DeviceN option in the output settings of the print dialog box. When distilled locally using Acrobat Distiller and viewed with enfocus pitstop, it appears to have resolved this issue (i.e. colorised greyscales are now assigned the spot color they had in Quark).

However, using these PDFs in ApogeeX results in a postscript error of "image type mask" or something along those lines. I know the solution is not to print with DeviceN but rather the Composite CMYK and use the latest AGFA Ctiff xtension, but that only solves the problem if we are distilling/normalising the files locally. it does not resolve the issue of PDFs created offsite by clients!!! DeviceN created PDFs work to Fuji Harlequin rips but not to ApogeeX (or i think Creo rips).

Again, has anyone had similar problems or any workarounds for this issue?

many thanks

[CitrusZ28]

I have gotten the image type mask error before, I think that it was a colorized tiff with a clipping path. Not allowed in ApogeeX. the fix was to make it a monotone image and save as an eps. I have had no problems with DeviceN printing, but if you do, you might want to try to print as seperations and see if that works.

[CollyWolly]

Have received an answer from AGFA concerning the huge imposition. Seems that a recent patch had some side effects, concerning - guess what - the imposition TP. they promptly sent a fix and after loading it, turning rip off and on and reprocessing the ticket, all is wonderful! recommend that any ApogeeX users finding impositions slow lately may have that to blame and recommend they contact their techie ASAP.

still no answer from AGFA on the other issue though. I do appreciate the posted note but unfortunately it does not fix the issue once a pdf is supplied from the customer, which is the biggest concern.