The 2016 archive

These comments and polls appeared on the home page of Prepressure.com during 2016:

Prepress Pete is tweeting

Gimme a fiver to embellish my rose drupa cloud – https://www.prepressure.com/prepress/history/events-2016

Time traveller

Best wishes for the new year

Keep those presses busy! While they are at it, take your time to have a look at what happened in 2016.

Diorama from the Boston public library

Prepress Pete is tweeting

Having a glass of wine with Uncle Cole and some kids to celebrate # – https://www.prepressure.com/printing/history/1800-1899#first-christmas-card

The oldest mass-produced Christmas card

Old prints

I like old prints, such as photochroms, so it was a pleasant surprise to stumble across the card below. The ‘Actien Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation’ will celebrate its 150’th birthday next year. In case the name doesn’t ring a bell: you might know the company by its abbreviated name, Agfa.

Agfa photochrome print

Prepress Pete is tweeting

Big shocker! I thought designers deliver crappy files because they work too much for the web. Turns out most suck at web design as well

Prepress Pete is tweeting

Will some voodoo print goddess come & haunt me now that I canceled my newspaper subscription on International Print Day 2016?

Prepress Pete is tweeting

Boss asks how we can offer customers an efficient end-to-end workflow across the entire value stream. Did the hot-melt glue get to his head?

Why print money on polymer

In June the Bank of England introduced its first banknote printed on a polymer substrate. The five-pound note is called The New Fiver and features a portrait of Winston Churchill.

Polymer banknote 'The New Fiver' printed by De La Rue

All the other UK banknotes are still printed on cotton. These are the advantages offered by polypropylene banknotes:

  • Plastic banknotes are more durable since they are more difficult to tear and more resistant to folding.
  • The notes repel dirt and moisture so they don’t soil as easily. The polymer is also more resistant to micro-organisms.
  • Because the biaxially orientated polypropylene (BOPP) is more rigid, the banknotes work better in ATMs and automated sorting operations.
  • Plastic currency is up to twice as expensive to produce but the bank notes last two-and-a-half to four times longer than notes printed on cotton paper. The notes can be recycled so there is also an ecological advantage.
  • The new banknotes are more difficult to counterfeit. In Canada, a pioneer in the use of synthetic currency, the number of reported counterfeits dropped by 74%.

The new notes are printed by De La Rue, as can be seen in this ‘Making of’ video.

Interesting reads

Recently I read two white papers that I really liked, which is rare since so many of these documents nowadays get written by content marketing companies who don’t really have any expertise in the subject they are covering.

  • Do PDF/VT right‘ is written by Martin Bailey of Global Graphics. This guide is useful for anyone working on or interested in variable data processing.
  • Differences between the GWG 1v4 and 2015 specifications‘ sounds boring but this is a very readable overview of how preflight requirements have changed in the past few years. It was written by David van Driessche as part of the documentation for the new Ghent Workgroup preflight specifications.

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