Mailbox
By Staff -- graphic arts online, 7/1/2003
When Type Was TypeEditor:
Although this is a bit behind, I feel I have to comment on your cover piece for May 2003: your illustrations of letterpress type, if put to use as shown, would print backwards.
Today's computer nerds wouldn't notice this, but we oldtimers treasure our memories of working with foundry type. The joy of setting type by hand hour after hour, and the infinite pleasure of redistributing the characters into the type case after the job was printed—taking care not to include those that the heavy-handed press operators had battered as they were sending the forms back to the composing room—was sublime.
Who wants to sit at a computer keyboard pumping out endless pages of fault-free type, when you can handset at 2,000 characters an hour? As a printer for the last 55 years, I do miss those days, when printing was truly a craft. I guess I will just go out as an endangered species. Yours in craftsmanship.
Ron Noon, Fraser Printers Ltd., Cloverdale, B.C., Canada
Calibrated ProofingEditor:
Your excellent May article, "Printers Weigh Remote Proofing Options," omitted mention of the Oris Color Tuner system, long in use by publications, advertisers, and other print buyers.
The most recent version, 5.0, includes Automatic Calibration, which allows even non-color experts to maintain a color match across multiple devices, assuring the decisionmaker that each proof adheres to the target color space. AutoCal prints and measures a standard target, and the resulting data automatically adjusts Color Tuner's behavior to the desired state.
Oris Color Tuner performed extremely well at the recent IPA Color Proofing Roundup, where it achieved extremely close Delta-E matches to both SWOP (TR001) and GRACoL (draft TR004) color spaces. Together with fast, inexpensive ink-jet devices from Canon, Color Tuner is an ideal choice for remote, hard-copy proofing.
John Parsons, director of marketing communications, CGS Publishing Technologies International, Minneapolis
More on GPO BiddingEditor:
As plant manager of a firm that prints retail advertising, I was interested in one of your on-line articles about how the Government Printing Office is changing its bidding process. Do you have any contact information?
Mark Jackman
Printers interested in bidding on this work should visit the print procurement section of GPO's Web site, www.gpo.gov/procurement/index.html for updates.
