BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
"We are putting the cover of The Revolution Betrayed on
the presses early tomorrow morning," said Bill Estrada, a
sheetfed press operator in Pathfinder's print shop, in an
interview on May 27.
The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky is the first Pathfinder book being produced with computer-to-plate (CTP) technology. Using this state-of-the-art system, and reorganizing labor in Pathfinder and its print shop at the same time, will allow the publisher to keep its 350 titles in print with a smaller and less complex shop and at a lower cost for short runs.
The printing plates for the six-color cover of The Revolution Betrayed were produced at a plant in New Jersey that has CTP equipment of the kind Pathfinder's shop will soon acquire. Electronic files of the cover were used to produce the plates. Another company digitized the cover, using a method called copy-dot scanning.
One of the challenges print shop workers still face is figuring out the best method to put multicolor covers, as well as photos and graphics, in an electronic format. The copy-dot method - scanning the old film flats dot by dot - produces very high-quality digital files, said Pathfinder print shop business manager Juliette Montauk. "But it is very difficult, if not impossible, to edit these files to fix imperfections, alter or add type, or change the width of the book's spine." Other methods, such as scanning the printed covers themselves, are being tested.
Saving labor time
Once the cover is digitized, however, preparing the job
for the press is fast. "It took about eight minutes from the
moment an operator pressed the button on the CTP machine and
sent the electronic file through, until a plate was imaged
by lasers and came out of the chemical processor ready for
the press," said Lisa Rottach.
Rottach is a customer service representative at Pathfinder's print shop. She accompanied Estrada at the New Jersey plant to oversee how the plates were produced.
To strip the film manually into a flat sheet, burn the plate using a light frame, and then develop it through a processor would have taken about 25 minutes per plate - three times longer than with a CTP machine. Manual stripping of film and burning of plates is the method still in use at Pathfinder's shop to prepare jobs for the presses. This skilled and labor-intensive process will soon be bypassed.
The benefits are not limited to a reduction in labor time for production. "The workers operating the CTP equipment at the New Jersey plant are not highly skilled," said Rottach. "It doesn't take a computer science degree or years of training to run that machine."
Estrada pointed out that the use of plates produced through CTP technology will cut down make-ready time on the presses he is running and help increase productivity. "The plates produced this way are more precise than those burned manually. We won't need to do a lot of tweaking, which now takes experience and craft to do, to register the colors properly. And the imperfections on the plates we have been using - caused by dust that leaves tiny holes when the plate is burned by hand - are no longer there. It takes time during the press run to fill these little holes on the plates with image additioner."
Press operators will be able to boost productivity and concentrate on improving quality, Estrada said. "It will also become easier to train new operators."
Volunteers complete formatting
In the morning of May 28, as sheetfed press workers were
preparing the presses to begin printing the cover of The
Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder received the finished
electronic files of the body of the book, including the
index, from supporters of the communist movement in San
Francisco.
"It took us a lot longer than we thought to format the book," said Jerry Gardner in a telephone interview from his home in Oakland, California. Formatting is the last stage of preparation of electronic files of books before they are ready to be sent to printing plates. "Everything that could go wrong did, and more. But because of this it was a tremendous learning experience. We are now in a good position to get a production line going in digitizing the books."
Gardner, an electrician who learned formatting from scratch in the last three months, is one of the four members of a steering committee based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The committee, headed by Ruth Cheney, is responsible for organizing volunteers around the world to scan, proofread, and format the entire arsenal of books Pathfinder is responsible for keeping in print and distributing.
The electronic files of The Revolution Betrayed completed by supporters of the communist movement in California will now be sent to the same printer in New Jersey who will produce printing plates through his CTP equipment. The book's text is scheduled to be printed in Pathfinder's shop, using the digitally produced plates, beginning June 1.
The book will be ready for delivery about ten days later, according to Montauk. The publisher had only 16 copies of the book in stock as of May 27.
"Next week we will start formatting Sexism and Science," said Gardner. The book, by Evelyn Reed, has already been scanned and proofread. "And a party supporter in Seattle will begin formatting Rosa Luxemburg Speaks shortly after that."
According to Cheney, about 100 volunteers from around the world have signed up for the project so far. Those who would like to join in scanning, proofreading, or formatting Pathfinder books can contact Cheney at 102616.3037@compuserve.com
The transformation of the organization of Pathfinder's book production now under way is needed to meet the demand for the publisher's arsenal among fighting workers and youth. The current production methods require an inordinate amount of labor time and are too costly to keep pace. The need becomes clearer every day as working people around the United States and internationally are stepping up resistance to the demands for "sacrifice" by the bosses, and socialists are finding a greater audience for revolutionary literature.
`Action Program' in Swedish
Supporters of Pathfinder in Stockholm publishing
pamphlets in Swedish are using the initial lessons of the
international project to digitize all Pathfinder books to
save labor time in production.
"It might be interesting for Pathfinder to know that we produced the Swedish-language An Action Program to Confront the Coming Economic Crisis using computer-to-plate technique," wrote Catharina Tirsén, a member of the metalworkers union in Stockholm, in a May 24 letter. "So I guess this is the first Pathfinder book produced with this technique!"
After formatting the pamphlet in the computer, and using a software program that allows arranging the pages in the proper order for printing, "We printed it all on paper for a final check and made final proofreading. Then we printed the ready spreads directly onto the plates from the computer on our Hewlett Packard LaserJet printer, two pages on each spread, which is the way we have printed all books here....
"This must have saved us weeks in time from when all strip-up was done on paper and later photographed onto film."