About

Here’s a bit of background information about Prepressure.com and myself.

I’m Laurens Leurs. I studied Industrial Design a long time ago but somehow ended up working in the graphic arts industry. I started out as a customer support engineer and gradually moved to a pre-sales job. Nowadays I am the devil-do-it-all for an editorial system and spend my days writing manuals, hunting bugs and doing demos.

If I ever get the opportunity to play the prepress geek
in The Simpsons, I’ll probably look like this.

Prepressure

I started this site around 1997 as a kind of HTML exercise. The original site ran on a web server of the city of Antwerp. The very first pages were created using Claris Homepage. As a support engineer I got daily calls about PostScript errors. The site became my database of everything I knew about this type of problem so it was called the PostScript Panic Page. Around 3000 people visited that site in 1998.

After a few years I switched to DreamWeaver and a spot on the site of Belgacom, my internet provider. Being an early PDF fan, I added a big section about PDF to the site. To reflect the change, the PostScript Panic Page became Prepressure. In 2001 the number of yearly visitors had already increased to 40000.

In 2002 I registered the Prepressure domain name and moved to shared hosting. I’ve been happy with the service of ICDsoft over the years. In case you are curious: this site runs on an HP DL380 server somewhere in Hong Kong.

I did lose interest in the maintenance of the site for a while. Until recently I was the editor of a support newsletter and doing two similar jobs was simply too boring. My job description changed in 2007 so I decided to clean up the site while migrating the design to a database driven system. This move finally enabled me to have a site design in which visitors themselves can share their knowledge using the Comments function. The redesign seems to draw less visitors so I’ll still need to do some tweaking and work on promoting the site. In 2007 the web server served around 1.6 million pages.

Have fun!

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Legal disclaimer: The author of this web site cannot be held responsible for any damage inflicted by the use of the information provided on this web site. This site is beerware: if the information provided is of some use to you, you are obliged to offer the author a Duvel or other Belgian style beer whenever you encounter him and he is in the mood for a drink. The author freely admits that he is often in the mood for a good beer. No animals were hurt during the creation of this site (yet). The ads on this site are not used to adapt your interest profile – your privacy is as important as mine.