Timed to co-incide with Europe’s major printing exhibition, IPEX, which was running last week at Birmingham’s NEC, Intergraph Corp launched a series of distributed publishing tools into the European market, centered around the Informix relational database and including WYSIWIG software combining text, spreadsheet and graphics functions to run on its Clipper-based range of workstations. The software from the Huntsville, Alabama company is designed to integrate the more common computer page-makeup functions with computer-aided illustration and graphics generation, and with Intergraph’s more traditional business of computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering. At the IPEX show, the company was demonstrating a system aimed at designers of packaging for retail products, and ran through the process of designing a toothpaste tube, from rough graphics sketching of the idea to final design, including three dimensional modelling; analysis of the model to check the fit of the package with its intended contents, and to verify its manufacturability and durability; full three dimensional visualisation, with facilities for wrapping artwork round the package and creating a complete setting with scanned images, light sources, and shadows; and output of artwork via Adobe Systems’ PostScript page description language to a variety of output devices. The same data is used both for the design artwork and as the manufacturing information that is fed to numerically controlled machine tools. Intergraph also gave a preview to a new PostScript image engine that can output colour separations, the Coloursetter 2000, which is currently under development by its recently acquired subsidiary Optronics, which will be launched next year: the imagesetter also uses the Clipper RISC processor, all rights to which were acquired by Intergraph last year, and is designed to write colour PostScript files in two minutes.
