About VPS+

A new soft-proofing solution called VPS+ has been released with Prinergy 9.0. The release of VPS+ represents the first step in the development of a comprehensive new soft-proofing solution for Prinergy workflow.

The code base for the original VPS is end-of-life and cannot be updated to run on macOS 10.15 (Catalina) and above. For compatibility with the latest Mac systems, a completely different code base was used to develop the new VPS+, and the user experience has a different look-and-feel from the original VPS “Classic”.

VPS+ has been released to provide immediate support for customers who have no alternative other than to run production on the latest Mac operating systems.

In additional to the change in user experience, it is important to make clear that VPS+ does not yet have feature parity with VPS Classic. VPS+ was released “as is” to allow customers with no other option to run on the latest Mac operating systems, but we recognize the first release of VPS+ will not satisfy all customers due to current limitations.

VPS+ is only automatically installed by the Workshop installer on Macintosh OS 10.15 and above. The installer for Windows and legacy macOS clients will continue to install VPS Classic by default.

VPS+ Limitations

The most significant feature missing from VPS+ is the ability to view backed-up front and back surfaces of an imposition.  

If you are currently running VPS Classic on macOS 10.14 and front-and-back viewing is a requirement for quality-control, we advise you not to update your Mac OS and continue to run VPS Classic.

An updated version of VPS+ with front-and-back support is in development, and will be released with Prinergy 9.0.1.

VPS+ Known Limitations

• VPS+ cannot view the front and back of an imposition at the same time, sides can only be viewed individually.
• Resolution of images at certain zoom percentages is not as sharp as VPS Classic
• Speed when changing zoom levels is not as fast as VPS Classic. (VPS Classic is faster because it pre-renders a defined set of zoom levels. VPS+ allows any zoom percentage, but pays a price for this flexibility in terms of speed. Future versions of VPS+ will move to pre-rendered views to improve performance.)
• Ink Coverage is calculated in the Separations Inventory panel in VPS+, but there is no UI to allow users to compare ink usage between Candidate and Reference files.
• VPS+ on Windows still runs in 32-bit mode and has a limited memory footprint. Certain files that are too large will cause it to crash when attempting to load the files.