Optimized Three-Stage Strategy of Orderly Management of File Stream in Network Printing Workflow

This paper proposed the optimized three-stage strategy of orderly management of file stream in network printing workflow. In first stage the customer preflight was added to the conventional prepress preflight, which set quick-type, general-type, stable-type and comprehensive-type preflight scheme for customers by investigating the possibility of occurrence of errors of various preflight entries and customer relevancy. Based on four types of preflight schemes, four customer preflight applications were created by using Pitstop Pro and Connector You. Customers can select one of the appropriate applications for quick preflight before delivering to reduce the probability of returning the files back for correction when errors occur in preflight. Second stage is printing enterprise prepress preflight, which proposed the concept of the prepress preflight tolerance. In addition, according to the different requirements of printing technology and quality, this paper established the prepress preflight scheme based on the printing enterprises’ tolerance for preflight error. Third stage is to manage the optimized sorting of prepress file stream. To achieve it, the SPT rule and the 0-1 programming model were adopted, time spend of preflight, printing process and post-press finishing was also taken into account. Moreover, Enfocus Switch software was applied to establish automated network printing workflow and complete the file stream sorting. Finally, the result of simulation analysis of the optimized strategy shows that the optimized three-stage strategy can effectively shorten the file processing time.