Quark Mac to proprietary grouping/rip system

[marco-bct]

The company I was working for was recently bought by a larger company, and I've been tasked to find the way to transition our work to the "new" company's system.

We were completely Mac OS X 10.4.10 based, using Quark 6.52, Illustrator CS2, etc. All of our archives are essentially the Quark files with linked art. It spans 10 years of work.

The "new" system is a custom-built system that appears to be about 6 years old. It is MS-Server driven, with a SQL backend. It allows the entry of typesetting for simpler business card and other orders. It handles all job grouping for business cards and the like, stores the artwork, and outputs the plates with production information as cover sheets. In some respects, it allows a level of automation that's really nice compared to our relatively manual workflow from before.

But for that strength, its major weakness appears to be that it requires VERY specific file formats for use as "camera ready" artwork. Specifically, it needs LZW-compressed PC TIFF or EPS files, and each spot color must be separated into its own file (1-bit TIFF). So, a two spot-color job needs two uniquely-named TIFF or EPS files. Naturally, all the EPS files have to have fonts converted to outlines.

Oh, yeah... all the art files have to be named with DOS 8.3 naming, and they HAVE to be unique amongst the 90,000 or so archived files. Us Mac users, naturally, are not very used to such naming limits. :-)

So, my question is, anyone have some idea how I can get Quark 6.52 for Mac to output a separated set of TIFFs? I'm not against purchasing a plug-in for Quark or even an intermediate step like running a Quark PDF through Acrobat with a custom plug-in. I would like to automate it as much as possible, but for now I'll take progress over perfection. :-)

Thanks in advance!

[Cory]

I've read your question a few times and just keep thinking to myself what a PITA that sounds to get some simple business cards out the door.

1-bit tiff means you need screened data which means you need to go through some type of RIP (assuming some of your jobs have screens). If that is the case you might be looking at some type of harlequin rip and just capture the tiff out from that.

How much money are you looking to spend for a solution?

[almaink]

Will a Quack DCS work? Creo has an extension for producing them. Or perhaps exporting as a separated PDF and converting to eps if your system doesn't handle PDF's?

[Cory]

I think the main problem is the requirement of 1-bit tiffs

[David]

man, what a workflow...

but,
I found this with a google:

XPressImage


XPressImage Pro


hope it helps,
David

[marco-bct]

Thanks, all... yeah, as so eloquently put, it's a PITA. :-)

In fact, as it turns out we have to generate PDFs out of Quark (thank goodness for the Output Enhancement Xtension) and then manually separate those in Photoshop. Since it appears they want to dismantle our Mac workflow over time, I can't imagine them spending much on plugins or apps to do this (despite what I thought initially).

Sadly their RIP is at best a level 2 PS RIP running on NT. It chokes on most EPS files we toss at it, and certainly knows nothing about PDFs.