workshop
pagora
prototyping
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Prototyping Workshop #1 - Pagora, École internationale du papier, de la communication imprimée et des biomatériaux, December 9th-13th 2024

Supervised by Dominique Cunin, Raphaël Bottura and Romain Laurent.

EPE - Prototyping phase

The prototyping workshops are an opportunity to work more rigorously on the editorial chains we created during the propagation phase. They provide an occasion to interrogate our tools and find preliminary solutions to the major, if not prohibitive, shortcomings of the web-to-print chain in professional use. The idea is to get direct inspiration from professional graphic design and communications activities that have made use of web-to-print and encountered difficulties in the realization process.

Pagora, École internationale du papier, de la communication imprimée et des biomatériaux

This workshop was held in Pagora's engineering school during 5 full days, from December 9th until 13th of 2024. Pagora is a member of the EPE consortium. Their insight in the very technics and engineering of printing systems, starting with paper making up ink chemical composition, make them the perfect collaborator to study the industrial landscape of printing materials and technical challenges. Lionel Chagas and Nadège Reverdy-Bruas are the main professors engaged in EPE from Pagora. They helped Esad•Valence to make this workshop a reality in their facility, located in the Grenoble-Alpes University Campus of Saint-Martin d'Héres.

Main themes

Color layer management

One of the major limitations of web browser-based PDF file generation today concerns the management of color separations according to the printing machine to be used. Conventional DTP software allows images, graphics and text contained in a document destined for printing to be described in Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK), or in any other direct tone layers based on shades explicitly specified in a color palette. These layers are separated from each other, color by color, so that they can be inscribed on separate matrices for printing using a specific technique (offset plates, screen printing, Riso master, etc.). A PDF generated from such DTP software therefore contains these layers and their description, encapsulated in a standardized file compatible with industrial printing lines. How can this compatibility be achieved in a web-to-print environment?

Print raster management

The halftoning (or rasterization) process required by digital printing involves the conversion of matrices between them: when an image is vector-based, it has to be passed through a grid representing the dots that will be filled with a tint by the printing device, and when the image is already raster-based, it has to be interpreted in the matrices that are physically usable by the printing machine. The ink is dropped onto the paper in dots, whether it passes through a dot-pierced film or a printing form is pressed onto the paper to transfer it. Image processing software can be used to define any screen to be applied to an image. Some software utilities specialize in this task alone (Vectoraster: https://www.lostminds.com/vectoraster8/). As a digital object, the image is transformed by a screening algorithm to produce a new image file. Digital printers incorporate their own rasterization system, included in their Raster Image Processor (RIP), a piece of software located in the printer's operating system or embedded in a chip. Is it also possible to parameterize post-script rasterization? And in what patterns (classic half-tone screens/patterns/stochastics...)?

Creating a color screening software

Graphic designers would find it useful to be able to manipulate the rasters applied to each layer of an image before printing. A software utility allowing this could be specified and prototyped. For almost all artists and designers, all these pre-print image manipulations have to be carried out in Adobe Photoshop. Possibility of bypassing the Adobe suite. Working with multi-layers and customising half-tones on Photoshop is not easy to get to master. Furthermore, their projection capability (ability to see superimposed colours and screens) is very limited. There is a real interest in working simultaneously on all the layers making up an image.

For the image processing tools, we can analyse two public p5.js librairies : p5.riso & p5.FIP. The first one was made by Sam Lavigne for a riso printer, selecting as inputs the image and riso colors, and outputs single png files for each color layer defined. The second one is using some shaders in glsl, so uses WEBGL mode of p5 and import shaders ready to use like “duotone”, “grayscale”, “threshold”, “dot”, “dithering” that could be interesting to use.

ECRANPAPIER
EDITER

About

EPE — Écran, Papier, Editer is a European cooperation project funded by Creative Europe and supported by Esad-GV. Its aim is to offer technical chains for editorial creation based on Web technologies (Single Source Publishing, WebToPrint, Open Hardware, etc.).

Contact

EPE
ECRAN PAPIER EDITER

ÉSAD Valence
Place des Beaux-Arts
26000 Valence

contact@epe.esad-gv.fr

Credits

Developed by Cédric Rossignol-Brunet
Designed by Coline Houot and Romain Laurent

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