COLE'S NEWSWIRE, April 10, 1996

April 10, 1996
Vol. 2, No. 15

The NEWSWIRE is a weekly distribution of information about the sales and installations of publishing technology and the latest news on new products developed by suppliers to the industry.

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ADOBE SYSTEMS INC.
Adobe, of Mountain View, Calif., has announced that a new production printing architecture, code named SUPRA, will be developed under a technology team of 26 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) set up to collaborate on the evolution of SUPRA.

SUPRA will integrate the Adobe PostScript language and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) standards for OEMs that are developing products for the high-end, production print market.

Among the OEMs with which Adobe will work initially are Agfa-Gevaert Group, BARCO Graphics N.V., Colorbus Inc., Crosfield Electronics Ltd., Digital Equipment Corp., Eastman Kodak Co., Electronics for Imaging Inc., Escher-Grad Technologies Inc., IBM Printing Systems Co., IPT Inc., Indigo N.V., Linotype-Hell AG, Management Graphics Inc., Monotype Systems Ltd., PrePRESS Solutions, Scangraphic PrePress Technology GmbH of Germany, Screen and Dainippon Screen Mfg. Co. Ltd., Scitex Corp., Silicon Graphics Inc., Splash, Sun Microsystems Computer Co., Tektronix Inc., Ultimate Technographics Inc. and Xerox Corp.

ARCHETYPE INC.
Archetype, of Waltham, Mass., has announced that its publishing server software now will run in native mode on Apple Computer Inc.'s Network Server machines, the 500/132 and 700/150.

Archetype also has announced enhancements to its two primary products, InterSep OPI and MediaBank. InterSep now has permission-based access to print queues, nested desktop color separations (DCS), T4/G4 compression support, automatic deletion of ViewFiles upon deletion of corresponding high-res images, and automatic cropping of EPS or DCS images.

Four enhancements have been made to MediaBank, a publishing database. Internet Gateway allows access to MediaBank from the Internet by any World-Wide Web browser. Personal MediaBank is a stand-alone version of the MediaBank browser, enabling a user to download groups of job elements from a central site, work on them locally (on a machine with MacOS, Windows 95 or Windows NT) and then return them to the main workflow. Archiver Pro now supports digital linear tape and digital audio tape drives. And, Job-based HSM (hierarchical storage module) has been modified to meet the needs of the graphic communications industry to optimize access to storage devices by managing a hierarchy of hard discs, optical drives, CD-ROMs and tape drives.

CASCADE SYSTEMS INC.
Andover, Mass.-based Cascade has announced that it will prepare its products to run on the new UltraSPARC server products from Sun Microsystems Corp. of Mountain View, Calif. Cascade markets MediaSphere, a multimedia archive system; DataFlow, a workflow management system, and ImageFlow, an open pre-press interface network router.

DAYSTAR DIGITAL
DayStar, of Flowery Branch, Ga., has cut the price on its Turbo 601 upgrade for the Macintosh by 45 percent, from $899 to $499. The Turbo 601 boosts performance of a Mac 68030 CPU (such as a Mac IIci or Performa 600) to the equivalent of a 66 megahertz PowerPC, enabling software to run seven to 11 times faster than on a stock PowerPC.

DayStar also is offering new prices for its Genesis MP multiprocessor conversions for Power Macintoshes. Converting a PowerMac 7500 or 8500 to a four-processor Genesis MP now costs $7499; conversion for a 9500 is $8499. Genesis MP greatly expedites handling of large files, such as color images.

HARLEQUIN INC.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Harlequin has introduced enhancements to WebMaker, a $99 multiplatform software system for converting FrameMaker documents into HyperText Markup Language (HTML) files.

Version 2.2 features RapidRules, which automatically creates a conversion template which can be used to start the conversion process quickly. Also in 2.2, which will be available later in April, is a Java-based web navigation panel.

WebMaker 2.2 will run on Windows 3.x, Windows95, Macintosh and UNIX platforms.

LASERMASTER CORP.
LaserMaster's DisplayMaker Professional digital color printer was named Best of Show after a "shoot-out" at the Photo Marketing Association conference sponsored by the Digital Imaging Marketing Association in February in Las Vegas.

LaserMaster, of Minneapolis, and about 30 other exhibitors were given 24 hours to print and finish an image provided by the association as a CD-ROM file. The winner was selected by conference attendees, based on the quality of the image and overall system performance.

Other exhibitors who competed included Ilford/Iris, Visual Edge, InfoGraphics and Hewlett-Packard.

MONOTYPE SYSTEMS INC.
Monotype Systems of Rolling Meadows, Ill., has announced that it has signed a distribution agreement with Miami-based Graphic Systems International Inc., making GSI an official dealer of Monotype Systems products.

GSI will distribute Monotype Systems' products for the newspaper publishing market throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, including fileserver, output, RIPping and imaging solutions, as well as database information tracking systems. Graphic Systems International, headed by Jesus Toledo, was formed in part from the technical support team from Hyphen Latin America Inc. Since the disintegration of Hyphen Inc., GSI has been providing assistance and support to all of Hyphen's ex-customers in RIPs, OPI servers, imagesetters and editorial systems. Other key people at GSI include two hardware and software directors, Toledo and German Acevedo; Software Support Director Gustavo Rios, and Administrative Supervisor Nury Ruizcalderon.

SOFTQUAD
SoftQuad, of Toronto, Canada, and Xerox Corp. of Rochester, N.Y., have signed an agreement under which Xerox will include SoftQuad's HoTMetaL Light 2.0 with its TextBridge Pro 96 software.

TextBridge Pro is optical character recognition (OCR) software that enables users to convert paper into HTML documents for the World-Wide Web. HoTMetaL Light 2.0 is SoftQuad's newest OEM version of its award-winning HTML authoring tool, HoTMetaL PRO. With the inclusion of HoTMetaL Light, the process of converting scanned text into digitized characters can be used to translate paper documents into HTML documents, ready for direct publication on the Web.

HoTMetaL PRO is the most popular stand-alone publishing tool for the Web and is available in Windows, Macintosh and UNIX formats. TextBridge Pro 96, which features Xerox's DocuRT (document recognition technology) OCR engine, has a street price of $260 and is available through retail and catalog outlets.

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COLE'S NEWSWIRE is compiled by Pete Wetmore and distributed by The Cole Group, publishers of THE COLE PAPERS, COLE'S GUIDE TO PUBLISHING SYSTEMS and consultants to newspapers and magazines worldwide. To receive more information about The Cole Group, send e-mail to: info@colegroup.com.

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