Agfa has announced the latest version of its Apogee prepress workflow with v11 promising greater automation and integration with PressTune, as well as the latest Adobe PDF Print Engine 5, which is compatible with PDF 2.0.
Apogee v11 can combine print jobs on the same sheet to optimize press time, while also keeping track of the actual order to help printers cope better with shorter run lengths. Apogee 11 leaves all collation marks, signature barcodes and other marks in place from the original order so that the finishing equipment can pick these up.
Erik Peeters, Global Marketing Manager Software Solutions. “Combining orders reduces plate changes and lowers production costs. As paper waste is significantly less, the ecological footprint decreases too. As always, Apogee looks beyond pure functionalities and takes the full production cycle into account.”
Agfa also says that Apogee 11 can function as a production hub for all output including digital devices as well as offset presses. Apogee handles all the production requirements like cut ‘n stack, or booklet printing. Apogee can also automatically impose jobs for digital output thanks to improvements to the Apogee Impose feature.
Peeters says that this automatic imposition is important for digital production, explaining: “Combined with Agfa’s cloud-based automation solution, PrintSphere AutoPilot, which uses XML or JDF information to intelligently route orders to the appropriate output device, it becomes a very powerful tool to increase the overall efficiency of a printing company.”
Agfa has also updated Apogee WebApproval, which is an online portal that lets print buyers access their jobs for file upload and page approval. Printers can now give their customers a degree of self-service, allowing them to create new jobs directly. There’s also a new ‘Guest’ function so that print service providers can offer the WebApproval service to print brokers and one-time users. Users can now also preview foldouts and check the size and position of layout elements.
There’s a new module, Apogee WebFlow, that lets customer service representatives, press and finishing operators pick up prepress job data to check job status, visualize page content and check which signatures are ready for output. It can also exchange job info with PressTune so that CSRs can check the print quality of their customers’ orders.
Apogee 11 will be released on 22 October 2018, both as on-premise offering with a subscription option and as a cloud solution.
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