The Flexo Best Practice Toolbox was officially launched last February 2019 at a press conference in Brussels, Belgium. It is now available in English for pre-order on the Apple iBook Store for €99.99.
The Toolbox is a technical eBook for those working in flexographic printing. It is a best practice and easy to use reference tool to help users achieve predictable, high quality, environmentally sound, and safe results. It is currently available as an iBook on Apple devices. The Toolbox has been designed to make flexographic printing simple through easily understandable videos, pictures and animations. The underlying concept is to help flexographic practitioners “Do it right the first time” by observing the norms, getting help from experience, or just refreshing existing knowledge.
It is very important to underline that this document is not the result of a copy/paste work from different contents, but a unique and original document, due to the multimedia content and the joint expertise from the FTA Europe federations and the eleven supporting companies who contributed to making the Toolbox come to life. The ebook format will allow the Toolbox to be updated as advice and technology evolves.
FTA Europe President, Sante Conselvan, said: “A skilled workforce is a crucial part of a flexo printing company and the Toolbox will contribute to the lifelong learning of employees. On behalf of FTA Europe, we want to thank the development team as well as all supporters of the Toolbox who helped us in realizing this unique multimedia educational tool”.
During the press conference Stefano D’Andrea stated that the “document is intended to provide information for every day’s needs in real flexo production, we wanted to create a simple to read and understand booklet, but it is not a shortcut to replace the need for proper technical education. The concept behind is to have a reference book in the pocket, for this reason the electronic format was a natural choice and besides this will allow additional contents to be included in future upgrades. The Toolbox is full of charts and videos, for example the section about plate mounting and characteristics of adhesive tapes is particularly rich in explanatory multimedia because it is one part of the process that involves more manual operations so the authors tried to show by images and videos how to perform such operations in the best way”.
A short video is available on the FTA Europe website for more information about the structure and objectives of the Toolbox, that covers all prepress and print steps, keeping in mind this basic idea: understanding the need of working within a defined, known, printing condition and consequently doing the necessary adjustments of the color reproduction of a printing system to match a set of characterization data, as described in ISO TS 10128.
