Offset & Beyond: Web, Sheetfed, and More
April 30, 2007

Offset & Beyond, PIA/GATF’s successor to the Web Offset Technical Conference, opened Sunday in Toronto, and with a decidedly Canadian flair. Brian Mulroney, Canada’s former Prime Minister, will keynote the opening session this morning. Luc Desjardins, CEO of Transcontinental, will address the general session. And Remi Marcoux, executive chairman of Trancontinental, will receive the Harry Quadracci Vision Award.

The conference includes content from the one-time Sheeted Pressroom Conference, which PIA co-sponsored with NAPL in Chicago until last year. On Sunday, for example, a sheetfed preconference series covered purchasing new or sued presses, and measuring and benchmarking sheetfed performance. Augmenting the technical character of the gathering, PIA/GATF provides a “Certificate of Completion” when participants complete two sessions on Continuous Improvement.

Balmy weather on Lake Ontario and 50,000 Sikhs, many in bright saffron garments, staging a religious celebration in the park next to the Sheraton Centre Toronto reflected the festive air of the first day. With 635 individuals pre-registered, and another 15 signing up on site—the new conference is off to a good start. Goss treated several hundred participants and partners to a great moonlight cruise on Lake Ontario last night. Mitsubishi plans an offsite plant tour this afternoon, and MAN Roland and Agfa are also sponsoring after-hours social events.

The sessions will run through Wednesday, and will address topics of interest for web and sheetfed production operations, which now includes just about everyone in the printing business.

This just in:
• Sales of Microsoft Vista, the operating system that makes PCs behave like Macs, have exceeded expectations. Printer can expect to see millions jobs arriving generated using Vista’s XPS file format—a doppelganger or PDFs. Regardless of printability these will be on the job docket, arriving in your workflow as do the once-reviled Microsoft Publisher files, now the world’s most used desktop publishing application. There is even an official Windows Vista Magazine.
• Global printing ink, including everything from desktop inkjet to commercial printing inks and bronze inks for packaging—reached $5.32 billion, with gross profit of 25.64% at $1,364,048,000. The U.S. imported $851 million, and exported $608 million reports Dublin-based Research and Markets—for net U.S. ink consumption of $4.94 billion in ink. www.reseachandmarkets.com
• A former paper factory in New York City now houses rocker Lenny Kravitz’s 6,000 sq.ft. apartment, now for sale at $19.5 million.

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