GN4 provides deadlines and milestones for tracking or the paper production. Deadlines mark the time when a specific production stage is supposed to be achieved, while milestones provide early alerts which help to respect deadlines.

To understand deadlines and milestones, we will start from the end of a page preparing process, and we will calculate the time frames for each stage we know a page goes through. For your convenience, we will concentrate on a single page. Let's assume you want to ensure that a page #5 is ready for the press run at 01:10 in the morning.

Knowing that you need 10 minutes to mount a plate, the page has to be there at least at 01:00. But, of course, the plate has to be processed too, thus allow at least 10 minutes for that (00:50). The typesetting time is 3 minutes (00:47), the ripping time is 1 minute (00:46), the transfer time is 1 minute (00:45), the page printing time is 1 minute (00:44). Now, allow 4 more minutes just to be on a safe side, and that means that the operator has to start to print the page #5 not later than at 00:40. This time may be called the page deadline time. In other words, the page has to be finished before or at 00:40.

Now, what means "finished"? Many things! Let's suppose that a page must not be printed if it's not approved. Allow about 6 minutes for the approval process. That means that approval for that particular page must start not later than 00:34. This may be called Approved milestone. But, what if approval should fail, and one or more page elements need to be redo? Allow at least 15 minutes for such event. It moves the milestone Approved to 00.19.

Moreover, to be able to approve page, you may want to have a final proof on the paper. Knowing it may take up to 5 minutes to get a page printed in a rush time, it means the final proofing of a page must start not later than 00:14. This may be called "milestone Final proof"

Of course, to be able to print a final proof, all the articles and images need to reach the "Ready" workstate at least 1 minute before that milestone. This may be called "milestone Elements ready", at 00:13. To make it possible, the articles and images need to read the Layout state at least 15 minutes before, thus at 23:58. This may be called "milestone Elements on Layout".

And so on, and so on - you can add as many milestones you want.

It's important to understand that the system of deadlines and milestones for editions, plates, pages, and elements (articles and images) is hierarchical and relative. On top there's the edition deadline, i.e. the time when the edition has to be closed. This is the only absolute time value in the deadline system, e.g. 40 minutes after midnight.

Related to the edition deadline, there come the plate gaps. You will assign plate gaps to plates, i.e. the number of minutes the specific plates need to be ready BEFORE the edition deadline. Each plate will have different plate gap, typically with 5 or 10 minutes distance, providing a continuous flow of plates and allowing to the press staff to process plates one by one, respecting the planned time of the press run. The plate deadline is calculated by subtracting plate gap from the edition deadline. Some GN4 customers will ignore the plate gap, leaving it on the default 0 minutes value. Such customers will set only page gaps.

Page gaps comes next. The page gap may be the same for all pages, if plate gaps were defined as explained above. If plate gaps were not set, then the page gaps need to be different for each page, or for groups of pages. The page deadlines are then calculated by subtracting the sum of the page gap and plate gap from the edition deadline.

Type gaps comes next. The type gap provides a distinction between different elements. For example, textual elements such as head and body may have gap of 5 or 6 minutes, while images may have a larger gap of 10-15 minutes. The element deadlines are calculated by subtracting the sum of the type gap, page gap and plate gap from the edition deadline.

•Edition deadline is mandatory, and manually entered as first (on the Editions main tab). You will always specify it as dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm, resolving in such way calculations when items cross the midnight boundary, or multiple days.

•Page gap (by default, it is 0 minutes, but you may enter any suitable value in minutes, in either Tracy or Fred4) allows to GN3 to auto-calculate the page deadline: it is the difference between edition deadline, the plate gap and page gap (edition deadline - plate gap - page gap). For example, if your edition deadline is 03-May-2012 on 03:00, your plate gap is 50 minutes, and your page gap is 20 minutes, your page deadline will be 03-May-2012 on 01:50. If you shift the edition deadline, or change the plate gap, the page deadline will be shifted too for the same amount of time.

•Type gap (by default, it is 0 minutes, but you may enter any suitable value in minutes) allows to GN4 to auto-calculate the element deadline, based also on its type.

Deadline themselves do not provide alerts on delay or completion. This is provided by milestones.