Rohan Holt wins seat on CIP4 board

The Australian inventor of Metrix is elected to the keenly contested member position at the highest level of the international process integration organization.

Winning the prestigious post is regarded as a tribute to the contribution and knowledge of the wunderkind of Australian graphic arts system development. As founder of LithoTechnics, Holt (pictured) is the original inventor of SuperImpose, the product that was adapted and renamed UpFront when it was acquired by ScenicSoft in 1999. Through acquisition, Kodak now owns UpFront.

Since then he has backed up with Metrix, the LithoTechnics’ flagship product. Designed and developed by Holt to automate job planning and imposition, Metrix integrates the front-end business systems with the back-end prepress and postpress production apparatus using JDF. An automatic layout calculator for commercial printers, it is used by estimators, production planners, and prepress operators to instantly calculate optimum layouts, even for complex ganging.

Holt is recognised as one of the industry’s most dedicated developers. He gained his initial insights into the production process with a long stint as a print production manager He describes his company’s mission as “providing key tools and technologies to enable print workflow automation.”

Holt is the second Australian to hold a sought after top-level position at CIP4. He joins Mark Wilton from Kodak, a Sydney expatriate living in Vancouver, who is in charge of education and marketing at the international organisation.

CIP4 is the International Cooperation for the Integration of the Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP4) Organization. Based in Geneva it is the driving force behind automating the printing process from prepress to finishing.

It is supported by all the leading graphic equipment manufacturers such as Heidelberg, manroland, Xerox, Agfa and Kodak, and is committed to defining future versions of JDF and developing a software development kit for comprehensive XML-based file formats to facilitate end-to-end job ticket specifications.