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Editor:

As a Chinese postgraduate student majoring in graphic arts and living on mainland China, I am a constant visitor to your Web site [gammag.com] and appreciate the content there. I think the reporting of news and the articles is very attractively presented and up to date.

I'd like you to know that the Asian-Pacific region is a very important place and should not be neglected. Hong Kong is a graphic arts and publishing center, and China is proceeding toward membership in the World Trade Organization.

Why not report industry news from the Asian-Pacific region? I'll bet industry people would be interested in news from this area.

H. Wang (

hanhave@163.net

I think you'll be surprised but pleased to learn that we have been covering printing industry activities in China for well over a year. We regularly publish a quarterly supplement called "Access China" in cooperation with NPES The Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing and Converting Technologies, Reston, Va., which set up a joint U.S.-China Printing & Publishing Technologies Center in Shanghai some years ago.

You can read the latest issue of "Access China" on the Internet via the NPES Web site. Simply go to npes.org/itrade/index.htm to reach the international trade section of the site, then scroll down to see the "Access China" portion. We plan to publish the next issue of the quarterly in the next few months.

Editor:

I am a final-year college student in a printing engineering program in India and am preparing a project on color management at the university level, in which I want to cover the following topics:

—What color management is.

—Why color management is a necessity in the graphic arts.

—How color management can be achieved.

—Information about color models and color theories, along with undercolor removal (UCR) and gray component replacement (GCR).

—Detailed information about device calibration for color management.

—Color measuring devices, such as densitometers, spectrophotometers, and colorimeters.

For my presentation, I am going to print target images that have been color managed using different profiles, which will give comparisons between color managed and non-managed images.

Do you know where I can find more information of this topic?

Ajit Bhat

am_bhat@yahoo.com

Just by coincidence, this month's cover story is precisely about color management. As associate editor Lisa Leland points out in the report, there is general agreement about its importance but, sadly, an underwhelming rate of adoption so far. She describes how some printers, after a few false starts, have made a success of color management systems and are deriving benefits.

Part of the process of adoption seemingly is the understanding that, in the case of proofing at least, the pressroom creates the standard, then it's up to personnel in prepress to produce proofs to match this ability to print.

Although the article doesn't cover all of the writer's points, a copy has been e-mailed to him.