Chapter 2: ISDN Helps People Work Together

Prepress

New York City's Axiom Design Systems uses ISDN lines to offer a battery of PostScript imaging services to ad agencies, design firms, publishers and corporate art departments. In fact, today more than half of the material sent to and from the company is delivered electronically.

"When all we handled was text, modems were quite adequate," says Jim Lynch, vice president of the firm. "But modems are a pretty slow way to transmit most of today's large photo, image and layout files."

Axiom Design also uses ISDN to offer bulletin board, e-mail and electronic conferencing services, as well as typefaces, stock photos and illustrations - all of which can be electronically previewed, purchased and downloaded.

Lynch believes that ISDN will also be the catalyst for a growing number of applications, including remote image database management, and the widespread use of a service bureau's high-quality dye-sublimation color printers as an industry-wide resource.

At Digital Pre-Press International in San Francisco, Dr. Sanjay Sakhuja heads a staff of specialists who offer high-quality color separation for slides, artwork and illustrations.

"Once these images are in a computer," Dr. Sakhuja says, "ISDN lets us transport even the largest of them across the street or around the world in seconds." DPI serves customers from virtually every area of the country, including many in the NYNEX "footprint." DPI also receives finished computer layouts of ads, magazines, books and more through ISDN, turning them into finished printing negatives - up to 33" x 44" - customized for the printer and press to be used. The ISDN links are also used to return low-resolution copies of a separation to a designer, who then crops and positions it in the final layout. The high-resolution counterpart, stored at DPI, is then inserted into the final version.

At Parade Magazine, a simpler but equally time-saving exchange of files takes place each week. According to Esteban Haigler, the publication's technical services manager, Parade works closely with a key advertising agency to insure maximum reproduction quality in the many ads placed by the agency.

Parade first scans black-and-white or color photos to its exacting specifications, and then - using Easy Transfer software and Planet Euronis ISDN cards for Macintosh - transmits them through ISDN connections to the agency. The agency then incorporates the photos into ads and returns finished EPS files to Parade, also by ISDN, where the ads are quickly pulled into Quark XPress layouts for the nationwide magazine.

"The files can be as big as seven to ten megabits," says Haigler. "We used to send them back and forth using optical cartridges and messengers, but now ISDN gives us a faster, simpler way."

Other Sections Of This Chapter:

Beginning Of Chapter 2
Linking LANs Together
ISDN: Dialed LAN Connectivity
Individual Access To LANs
Extending A Backbone
Fast Efficient Worldwide File Transfers
ISDN For Network Overflow
High Speed For FAX
Graphic Arts
Prepress
Photo Retrieval
Publishing
Couriers