We reported last week about how Adobe dropped their service program for printers in a post titled, “Adobe drops Print Service Provider Program – a Quark opportunity?“. Today we see an interesting offer from Quark via their Quark Alliance program for printers:

Adobe Service Network members are invited to join QuarkAlliance and Quark Promote output provider programs at no cost

Quark is offering Adobe® Service Network (ASN) members, current QuarkAlliance™ members, and all printers interested in Quark Promote the opportunity to join Quark® output provider programs at no cost. This special offer will expire on June 30, 2010, so act now to take advantage of member benefits that can include:

• Priority technical support
• QuarkXPress® 8 or upgrades
• Increased market visibility
• New potential revenue opportunities

“At a time when some in our industry are moving away from print, Quark is aggressively maintaining its investment in this community,” said Cyndie Shaffstall, director of QuarkAlliance.

Continues – read more: http://www.quarkalliance.com/

Printers- is this interesting for you? What’s your take on this?

Printers face threats not only from a bad economy
but also misguided political policy.

Last week I wrote about how jobs are flying out the door to China and other far-east print-shops, for print-work which will be used locally in North America or Europe. This was posted in a piece titled, “Print is not dead. Neither is outsourcing. China.” Now I want to expand on that (But reading some of the comments on the Linkedin link within that post are well worth the clicking.), especially with regards to this whole “green movement” which is going on.

First, let me make it clear, I love God’s creation and especially nature. We certainly have responsibilities not to pollute and cause intentional harm to our ecosystems. Thus, perhaps it is fair pushing the green thing on printers, to have them use less dangerous chemicals and inks in their commercial print shops. But why the double-standard when it comes to outsourcing and the environment or the green movement?

The host government aside in these outsourcing nations, how does our US government (Any “western” gov.’t really.) allow print outsourcing to go on at all; especially in light of these environmental effects? On that note, we read:  Read more... (512 words, estimated 2:03 mins reading time)

Since ICANN, approved the use of non-Latin characters in domain names today, I thought we would stick on the Internet side with this post. Jörg Oyen, the publishing, Adobe and Quark QPS expert friend of ours over in Germany at Oyen.de, sent me a rather ominous Instant message on Skype the other day, “Do you like balls”? he asked. For some reason, I thought, “oh, must be Google Balls” for it sounds very Googlish (sp?) No, he meant Tagul balls or Tagul meta clouds. Here, you can see Jörg’s meta ball from his site here:

Here is the Markzware meta data cloud (no mystery here):

Beware! This Markzware cloud is not complete and this is limitation of Tagul only getting the first 350 keywords or something to that effect. We see FlightCheck in there, but no Q2ID or ID2Q, our popular Quark-to-InDesign and the other way around as well, conversion tools.

Want to see how we made this? Watch the video here, for good control over your meta data, keywords and general SEO is very important for graphic designers, publishers and printers alike (Yes, print-shops included!):

Excellent article came out this month in Print & Paper Monthly about why Markzware’s FlightCheck Professionall and Adobe’s Live Preflighting within Adobe InDesign, should be used all in the same workflow. It is titled, “In flight, preflight, and post flight” and here is available to be read as an online edition as well.

“The question is: why use Adobe’s Live Preflight, Markzware’s FlightCheck Professional and Enfocus’ PitStop together? The answer is simple: for complete quality control.” Source: Print & Paper Monthly (U.K. – March 2009, page 17-18)

The article goes into great detail about where and how to preflight and how to get the most out of your workflow. It is a recommended read for any print-shop or even for publishers and designers, as preflighting crosses borders.

Updated with formatted table of Twitter Listing:

Printers who Twitter (version 2)
Prepress, print-shops and industry associations or professionals in print media who are active on Twitter.com
(Want it as a formatted Excel sheet? Tweet us; or comment below..)

Based on popular demand, we have expanded this list of print-type people on Twitter with those that RT (Re-Tweet), DM  (Direct Message) on Twitter or commented on our blog. We can always do a v3, so let us know if you are a graphic layout printer or prepress professional and not on this list!

NEW ENTRIES:
(Added locations, as requested by some.)
PRINTERS, PREPRESS – shops and individuals:  Read more... (1366 words, estimated 5:28 mins reading time)