Todd Potrykus

Todd Potrykus

Bertelsmann Services Inc

Todd Potrykus, manager of Bertelsmann's Media Factory, a print-on-demand facility that is literally across the street from Schmidt's location, operates entirely with a PDF workflow.
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Potrykus says that PDF is much easier and more stable than PostScript."We RIP from 1,000 to 2,000 PDFs a day," he says.

Todd Potrykus, manager of Bertelsmann's Media Factory, a print on demand facility that is literally across the street from Schmidt's location and featured in POD last year for its monochrome work, operates entirely with a PDF workflow.The Media Factory prints and fulfills all courseware for Microsoft in North America.It also handles personalized booklets for Cigna Healthcare, Aetna, and Pacific Care. Printing is done on three Océ DemandStream 8090s with a Prisma front end and two Xerox DocuTech 6180s with DocuSP.In addition, their own front-end solution customized to customer accounts feeds both the Océ and Xerox controllers.

Potrykus says that PDF is much easier and more stable than Postscript."We RIP from 1,000 to 2,000 PDFs a day," he says.Handling Postscript meant moving more volume and it was not as clean."

His biggest challenge is that there are always time lags between software upgrades and machine front-end upgrades."All of the vendors are still at the PDF 1.2 that Acrobat 3 writes," he notes, "while people are using Acrobat 4 and 5 and writing 1.3 and now 1.4 as well.I hope they will have that ability soon."

Todd Potrykus, manager of Bertelsmann's Media Factory, a print on demand facility that is literally across the street from Schmidt's location and featured in POD last year for its monochrome work, operates entirely with a PDF workflow.The Media Factory prints and fulfills all courseware for Microsoft in North America.It also handles personalized booklets for Cigna Healthcare, Aetna, and Pacific Care. Printing is done on three Océ DemandStream 8090s with a Prisma front end and two Xerox DocuTech 6180s with DocuSP.In addition, their own front-end solution customized to customer accounts feeds both the Océ and Xerox controllers.

Potrykus says that PDF is much easier and more stable than Postscript."We RIP from 1,000 to 2,000 PDFs a day," he says.Handling Postscript meant moving more volume and it was not as clean."

His biggest challenge is that there are always time lags between software upgrades and machine front-end upgrades."All of the vendors are still at the PDF 1.2 that Acrobat 3 writes," he notes, "while people are using Acrobat 4 and 5 and writing 1.3 and now 1.4 as well.I hope they will have that ability soon."

The version supported by print vendors is what Markzware's Marchese means when she points out the PDF workflows are version specific.For monochrome work, creating a PDF that's backwards compatible reportedly works.It's just an extra step that the file creator may overlook or not even know about and yet another thing the printer has to fix.However, when it comes to color files, the newer Acrobat file formats have color profile designations that may not be eliminated when saving backwards.If the creator doesn't shut these off in the newer versions, then the file will be awkward both for print on machines that don't support at least 1.3 and for display on the Web in certain browsers.Nonetheless, even in its present state, PDF solves more problems than it creates.

Todd Potrykus, manager of Bertelsmann's Media Factory, a print on demand facility that is literally across the street from Schmidt's location and featured in POD last year for its monochrome work, operates entirely with a PDF workflow.The Media Factory prints and fulfills all courseware for Microsoft in North America.It also handles personalized booklets for Cigna Healthcare, Aetna, and Pacific Care. Printing is done on three Océ DemandStream 8090s with a Prisma front end and two Xerox DocuTech 6180s with DocuSP.In addition, their own front-end solution customized to customer accounts feeds both the Océ and Xerox controllers.

Potrykus says that PDF is much easier and more stable than Postscript."We RIP from 1,000 to 2,000 PDFs a day," he says.