System admin, marketing, business analysis in prepress
23 Apr
One of the great pain in the rear ends with regard to Prinergy integration is its refusal to play nice with Windows drivers. Hooking up a Prinergy system to Lotem Quantum or Trendsetter is a cinch. If your plotter or 3rd party imagesetter (if anybody still uses those things anymore) has a Postscript RIP in front, hey no problem.
But outputting correctly to a copier or deskjet inkjet is pure hell, if not impossible. You have to have a Postscript driver and a lot of manufacturers don’t provide one. And the ones that do, most times the Postscript driver is not well maintained (translation: buggy as all get out).
So I was cruising the web one day and found Hot Folder 1.2 on a shareware site. It takes in TIFF and spools to Windows drivers printer and as soon as I saw it, it was like, oh yeah, I’m gonna try that.

You can run it for about a week and then you have to pay $20 for the license. And I paid the twenty, let me tell you. I can’t tell you how many hours in the field I spent trying to get Prinergy to play nice with 3rd party printers, so $20 was like nothing for me.
Just for giggles, I tried a direct connect from Prinergy to an Epson 7000. After rooting around on the Epson web site for a little while, I found the non-Postscript driver. I set up the Holder folder application (really easy to set up, I don’t even need to post instructions), and spooled a 360 dpi TIFF to the hot folder. It worked. Then I tried a 720 dpi Tiff. It didn’t work. I then fiddled around with the driver settings and tried again. It worked. Man oh man, where was this application about 7 years ago?
Note: This would probably work with Apogee workflow as well. And Artpro. And virtually any workflow system that can output a continous tone TIFF.
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