Re: rampage rip, what is OPI
Re: rampage rip, what is OPI
- Subject: Re: rampage rip, what is OPI
- From: email@hidden (Lee Blevins)
- Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 06:22:00 -0400
- Organization: Digital Graphics, Inc.
>
OK, sorry if this is obvious to some, but what is OPI?
OPI (Open Prepress Interface) was created by Aldus in the 80's as a
response to Quark's alliance with Scitex.
Scitex had invented a system called Visionary that allowed a low res
file to be exported from their CEPS system to a special version of
Quark. This gave birth to the idea of using a proxy image in a page
layout program. Scitex eventually dropped the proprietary version of
Quark and allowed the use of regular Quark with it's Visionary system. A
primary motivation for dropping the proprietary version was Quark suing
them for not reporting the actual sales of visionary and paying Quark
the royalties.
Aldus, feeling left out, created the OPI spec that would allow the
swapping of images by any system that would observe their OPI comments
in a postscript file.
Today you can see the remains of the Aldus effort when you view a
postscript file and see the "%ALD..." comments. The "ALD" is reference
to Aldus.
The comments explain to the OPI server the size, posistion, crop, angle,
crop, name, etc. of the image to be inserted.
A Rampage rip is a high end prepress rip that performs OPI image
replacement at rip time. The makes a third party OPI server unnecessary.
In my company this is very efficient since we want to archive the
postscript file with the job. Without OPI we'd double the storage space
since the images would be also stored in the Postscript file.
It [OPI] also offers a great efficiency in color correction since we
don't need to recreate the ps file when we color correct an image. We
simply re-submit the postscript file to the rip. So long as the image
name, size and crop remain the same, it will be replaced at rip time.
The Mach1 rip is the first rip for wide format inkjet that I have seen
that performs OPI. This will undoubtably give it a marketing edge.