What is Open Press Interface OPI software?

Answer 1

Let me start out by saying you probably don't need it, and it's really expensive--probably $5000 for the OPI server plus another few thousand for the computer that runs it. Open Prepress Interface is a system for managing enormous graphics embedded in page layouts. It is an "open" version of Scitex's proprietary Automatic Picture Replacement, or APR, package. Why it exists is that graphics in print have always been huge, and computers used to be very slow. As an example, you might be working on a clothing catalog. On a two-page spread, there might be twenty pictures--and all of them will be multiple megabytes in length. (In print we don't do 72dpi anything. I prefer a 350dpi image, and most people run 300dpi images.) When you place these massive images on a Quark page, they're hard to work with; they are slow to move, slow to draw, slow to print, and they bulk up your files dramatically. So if you could do all your designs with low-resolution pictures, but print with high-resolution ones, your life would be changed for the better. This is what APR and OPI do. When you save the high-res images, a special tag is embedded into them and a low-res preview image is generated alongside it. You can place these low-res files in your layouts. You then place the high-res images on a fileserver. When you print, you print to the fileserver. It sees the preview images' tags and swaps in the high-res files. This is a nice technology that really only makes sense to have if you own some serious graphics iron.