Subject: RE: OPI Server ready

From: Michalowski Thierry <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 09:54:11 +0100

Hi,

OPI needs to be far more intelligent that you mention. Just replacing an OPI
comment with a file is no OPI: it has to process other comments, especially
when the high-resolution file is a TIFF file. Just have a look at the
original Adobe OPI 1.3 specs for it.

As a side note, OPI **was** the holy grail for the printing industry, but
since most products fail miserably to be up-to-date with the latest tricks
in image processing, most of the publishing houses I know are trying to
bypass the OPI. Reliability vs performances tradeoff...

Next thing is: you need another tool to build FPO files, for placing them
into your pagination program (such as Quark XPRess). It is true that you
could, in principle, place the high-resolution files, and then print with
OPI enabled. But in such a case you will lose half of the OPI benefits.

There comes again the question for this opi3 product: does it include any
tool for automatic creation of theses FPO files? I've never seen the answer,
and don't want to dig into a bug source tarfile to figure out that kind of
things...thanks to the author for answering, please!

Last thing is also that you fail to mention two things concerning the Helios
solution (but hey, that's not a big deal!).
It runs on Linux (RedHat),and even ships with a ready-to-install Linux
RedHat system on the CD. Helios seems to have been pushing the Linux version
for a year now.
Helios OPI does on-the-fly job processing, provided that the queues are
AppleTalk(PAP)-based only. It is still true that it will locally spool
everything if you are using another printing method (such as pure LPR).
(There is also a proprietary TCP/IP printing method, but I don't know many
RIPs that can do it, Fuji seem to do.)

Sorry if all of this sounds too pedantic, it really shouldn't! But I felt
like I should share my knowledge with others ;-)

HTH
Thierry Michalowski

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Alegado [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 5:48 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: OPI Server ready

OPI is **THE** Holy Grail the print industry is looking for. The trade mags
mention Linux as a curiosity and of the few sites that use Linux, the
stumbling
block to full deployment is the lack of a good OPI solution. Unless the site
was
using it solely for file- and non-OPI print services, there's always the OPI
caveat mentioned in the articles. SIGH.

The leading solutions are either NT-based (ScenicSoft's "Color Central" or
IPTech's "CanOPI") or commercial Unix-based (Xinet's "FullPress" or Helios'
"EtherShare").

In principle, all it needs to be is a filter for a printer queue. The filter
would grep the PostScript stream and every time it sees an OPI "Comment" it
grabs the filename listed in the comment and substitutes the file for the
comment. Naturally, all kinds of intelligence needs to be built in to the
filter
for validating the OPI comment and dealing with the potential for
super-hairy
filenames which are, unfortunately, common on Macintosh volumes.

CanOPI from the list above does the file substitution on the fly while most
of
the others (I'm not sure about FullPress) write a new (larger) file as the
input
job is processed. CanOPI's method is slick since it minimizes diskspace
requirements on the OPI server and the read/write penalty.

On 2/6/01 at 2:06 AM, Bruce A. Burdick, Jr. <[email-masked]> wrote
some
or all of the following...

> If I recall correctly, in the publishing industry an OPI server is one
that
> swaps high resolution images for low resolution images (often called
"FPO"s
> for "For Placement Only"). I guess the connection to netatalk is that Macs
> have been big in publishing and a cheap Linux box with netatalk and a good
> open source OPI server would make for an interesting bargain. I don't
> remember what OPI stands for (Open Press Interface?).
> 
> -B...
> 
> > From: Volker Birk <[email-masked]>
> > Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 08:14:21 +0100
> > To: "Frank Morton" <[email-masked]>
> > Cc: "Volker Birk" <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>
> > Subject: Re: OPI Server ready
> > Resent-From: [email-masked]
> > Resent-Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 02:19:07 -0500 (EST)
> > 
> > On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 01:43:32PM -0500, Frank Morton wrote:
> >> Good! Does it include utilities to make fpo images?
> > 
> > What are fpo images?
> > 
> > VB.
> > -- 
> > *** ebios Informationssysteme, Germany      ***   vb@kangu:~ $ cd /pub/
> > *** Gut-Betha-Platz 1, 88339 Bad Waldsee    ***   vb@kangu:/pub $ more
beer
> > *** Phone +49-7524-93421 Fax +49-7524-93423 ***   Aaahhhh! That was
good!
> > *** mailto:[email-masked]                      ***   vb@kangu:/pub $ _
> > 
--
==========================================================================
 Alex Alegado, [email-masked], 626.524.0624 Cel w/VMail 
   Prepress Supervisor, California Plasticard 
     213.742.9852 Voice, 213.742.0086 FAX, http://www.cpicardgroup.com
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---

From: Carsten Neumann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 10:35:13 +0100

> Hi,
[snip]

PLEASE, PLEASE,

NO MORE HTML!!!

	Carsten