A decision support system for determining newspaper press layout configurations

Abstract

In recent years, the demand for colour in newspaper production has increased considerably as newspaper readers and advertisers expect more extensive use of colour in the illustration of papers. A newspaper printing press consists of many different physical components. The way that these are set up, a newspaper press layout configuration, determines the attributes of the newspaper: paper size, number of sections, section sizes, and the position of colour pages. The number of possible newspaper press layout configurations is very large and to determine a press layout configuration to match a specific newspaper requirement is a very complex procedure. This report summarises how the newspaper layout configuration affects the attributes of a newspaper and describes two applications Threading and Layout, which have been developed as decision support tools to generate all possible newspaper layout configurations.