Here was a popular discussion over on the “Prepress, Print & Color Management Professionals” group on Linkedin.com where Sean Runchman of Tunicca posed an interesting post and something I think many on our side of the printing fence have been thinking of for while, titled, “Premedia – the new Prepress?”

“We are seeing more and more encouragement for printers to diversify from a product offering based solely on print to more service oriented solutions. This requires printers to embrace the digital age even further and look at providing additional services demanded by the marketers within large brands.”
See full post and details here:

Then, to show the Markzware side, especially with the content conversion, content extraction and file recovery we offer, the MASSIVE business opportunity for printers out there is summed up in my last post on this hoping thread:

“Ink on paper is a term used often by printers. This expands to, “Content displayed as ink on paper.”

The printers controlled, in essence, the content up until the Internet. That today (ironically enough, for Gutenberg invented movable type to free content!) has more apparent freedom. Yet is that really so?  Read more... (374 words, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)

Now, I am quite sure there is more to this than meets the eyes.. or is this a sign of the Internet times we live and work in?

“…Please use either WordPress or InDesign. Don’t know of any other students using Blogger…“

said @scost1 on Twitter, apparently to a student- is this the ‘new world order of Graphic Design‘?

Source: http://twitter.com/barbaranixon/statuses/4788759496

Just a little WordPress or Adobe InDesign chatter on Twitter! Don’t even get me started on Google Wave. Sounds like this school and it’s students could use content conversion and text extraction provided by PageZephyr.com…

Don’t forget that you can also follow Markzware’s Tweets on Twitter here:
http://twitter.com/Markzware

“Content is free. Formats are not” is the article’s title from cnet. Now, this strays away from purely printing, although content in the digital printing world and certainly the publishing sector faces a similar fate:

“Content may be free, but the format in which we buy it certainly is not. As Apple, Google, Red Hat, and others increasingly demonstrate, consumers and enterprises are happy to pay for “free” when packaged in convenient formats that add value to digital goods.
….
All of these (re)purchases strike me that the media world may have problems, but they are mostly of discovering convenient formats in which to deliver content. Formats that suggest, and sometimes demand, payment.”
….
Good content is a necessary precondition to getting paid, but it’s not going to be reason we pay anymore. That reason for payment is the format in which the content is delivered.
Perhaps it’s always been that way, but the physicality of the delivery mechanisms confused us: we were buying the paper but thought we were buying the news.”
Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10369471-16.html  Read more... (348 words, estimated 1:24 mins reading time)

By Chad Chelius

As an Adobe Certified Instructor and Adobe Certified Expert for Aquent Graphics Institute (AGI) Training (www.agitraining.com), I spend my days teaching folks how to use—and make the most of—creative applications, like those developed by Adobe Systems and Quark.

It is encouraging to see competition among creative applications, giving users a choice. Whether that competition is between QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign—or on the Web front, between products like Dreamweaver and Expression, or Flash and Silverlight—having a choice is a good thing for the market. It keeps the developers of those programs motivated to meet our needs. It pushes them to innovate quickly, but responsibly.

When InDesign came on the scene, it meant that graphic designers had a choice of creative applications, but also some new challenges. For new adopters of InDesign, the question became: What to do with all the legacy files that were created in QuarkXPress, or how to handle third-party contributed content that may be in the form of native Quark files?”

For Quark loyalists, the reverse was suddenly true, as well, with native InDesign files popping up in their workflow. And, for a while, there was really no real resolution or alternative than to simply rebuild files in one application or another, reassembling the document from the ground up.  Read more... (585 words, 1 image, estimated 2:20 mins reading time)