Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A Publishing Workflow Pushes the Envelope
Versions, Versions Everywhere
The system has multiple functions for archiving and re-purposing newspaper pages: distilling incoming Postscript files to PDF, optimizing the PDFs for different purposes, cropping out register marks and bleeds, splitting and merging pages, de-screening and color correcting images and creating TIFF and JPEG versions of the pages for the ajc.com website.
For optimum ease of use, Apago Cluster Workflow features a Web-based administration tool that expands file metadata into business terms commonly used at the newspaper. An SQL database keeps track of the status of jobs in the system and allows users to search for specific jobs using the extracted metadata. Apago’s PDFmerge application lets editors drag and drop page thumbnails to create new editions of the paper from the original high-resolution pages.
“The 40-page cruise ship edition used to take an hour and a half with the old scripted desktop system. Today, the new automated process can produce that edition in roughly five minutes.”
Sharing the Load
These are all highly processor-intensive tasks. So Apago’s solution takes full advantage of the Xserves’ capabilities by constantly monitoring the CPU, memory, and disk use of each server and automatically assigning jobs to a server that isn’t busy. This ensures that the processors run at 100-percent efficiency as long as there are pages remaining in the job queue.
The resulting time savings have been dramatic: “For example, the 40-page cruise ship edition used to take an hour and a half with the old scripted desktop system,” says Morris. “Today, the new automated process can produce that edition in roughly five minutes. Similar gains have been realized for other outputs, as well.”
According to Morris, the power and simplicity of the new system mean that his people are free to work on new projects rather than baby-sitting production work. “It’s improved our efficiency and done away with a lot of hours that were spent trying to manually correct little details,” he says. “There’s no doubt we’re seeing substantial manpower savings.”
Flicking the Switch
The migration to the new system came off without a hitch. “From my very first meeting at AJC, I understood they couldn’t afford a moment of downtime,” says Kelly. “They needed a system that was fault-tolerant but also scalable. If they were to buy another newspaper or add another edition, they wanted to simply buy another server, mount it in the rack, load the software and experience no changes to their workflow. The system is designed to automatically scale.”
Currently, “with three clustered Xserves, including one at a remote facility, providing maximum processing power, fault tolerance and disaster recovery, we have plenty of capacity to last us a couple of years or more,” says Morris.
Expanding the Agenda
Next on Morris’s planning list is the creation of “electronic tearsheets” — the online PDF version of the proof of publication of a printed ad that newspapers have provided to their advertisers for the last century. These PDFs will be created by the Apago system and sent together with the customer and publication data by FTP to a third-party e-tearsheet hosting service.
After that project, the plan is to examine the feasibility of using the Apago system for the production of electronic print editions of the newspaper, to be sold via websites like Newsstand.com. The intent of this product is to create an exact copy of the print version of the paper as an optimized, web-viewable PDF — an ideal application for the system.
Morris is confident he has the business partners to handle the new challenges: “I’m delighted with the support we’ve had from Apago, and I’m even more delighted to be producing everything on Apple hardware.”
