Poligraf: from TEX to printing house

The macro package Poligraf was for the first time presented at the Polish TEX Users’ Group meeting “BachoTeX’96”. Users’ suggestions and remarks have been taken into account leading to this new, completely re-worked version. To my joy Poligraf has been received with significant interest. It turned out that a number of people use TEX for preparing publications for professional printing. Unfortunately, I must confess that the 1996 version had a number of shortcomings. First, the full functionality of Poligraf was only available with the plain format, which I use daily. My lack of latex knowledge caused latex users, who form a majority, quite a number of problems. Second, I attempted to solve too many issues at once. For example, I unnecessarily attempted to deal with assembling of print sheets. Now I know that there exist better and less error prone means to this end. Third, the colour separation mechanism was too extensive and thus became too complicated. In the meantime, in parallel to my work the cmyk-hax.tex package has been under development by my colleagues from the BOP company in Gdańsk. I came to the conclusion that this is a far better solution than the one proposed in the first version of Poligraf.