Hi,

When I look at the possibilities of a module like the Measurement module and the 100% printing preview, I wonder:

Would it be possible to let Calamus calculate the amount of ink that is nessesary to print the document?

This would be a VERY big help in calculating the cost of printing. I think all the information for this is available in Calamus, it 'just' needs to be brought to the screen. It also fits in the JDF theme this year on the DRUPA. (I saw a preview of a program that does this calculation.)

- Paul Pasveer

Paul!

This is hardly impossible, cause of the type of printer you´ve got. They all work diffrent, do you have an Piezo (Epson, Roland, Mutoh) or Thermal inkjet (Canon, HP, Lexmark, Encad), they differ in ink amount by the technologies.

Do you then work with color profiles ICC-profiles, every media has diffrent need of ink to get the best result! So I think its better to check the RIP/printer providers software that you get with the printer.

Of course its differ much if you produce A4/A3 or large format!

Regards // Henrik

Hi Hendrik,

Of course I don't mean it literally, sorry for the confusion. What I mean is the following:
A page with just black and white text could be divided into squares of, say, 1/600 by 1/600 inch, depending on the printer. Then the number of black squares could be counted and there you have the area of ink you will use. Many printers give a use of e.g. 900 pages per cartridge (or in my experience 700 pages) of 25 EURO with 5% coverage. So if my page has 8% black coverage, I can calculate how much it will cost.
Now, if a page is full-colour, the same calculation can be done for the other printing colours. Calamus puts a screen on the page just before printing, so, I thought that a small module a la LIN.CXM could calculate this. Maybe it can be done with the dots of the screen, which are of course made up of relatively easy mathematical forms (circle, triangle, square). Calamus could scan the screened page for the results.
I know in the past some freeware vectorisation sofware worked this way: dividing a page in small rectangles.


On the other hand, when the output is really RGB, Calamus could calculate the intensity of the colour, e.g. one pixel has R90G90B90(%), the printed result would be 10% black ink on that spot, to put it simply.
I can imagine printing in the Dummymode and get these results.
I think this would be a great help in calulation of work, together with the stopwatch module (CXmy).

- Paul