www.nickhodge.com

Thanks to David @ Creo Aus­tralia, I spent the after­noon yes­ter­day with the new ver­sion of Creo Prinergy, 2.1. It will take an Adobe Acrobat 5.0 PDF (PDF1.4) and flat­ten the trans­par­ency out of InDes­ign 2.0 in the RIP. This means that as print­ers install 2.1, you can export Acrobat 5.0 PDFs from InDes­ign which is way faster and have the RIP do the hard flat­ten­ing work. Oh yes, it also works with spot col­ours, too. In many work­flows, the abil­ity to late-stage edit a PDF is para­mount. With all the trans­par­ency fea­tures in InDes­ign 2.0, the flat­ten­ing does pro­duce com­plex PDFs that are dif­fi­cult to edit at a late stage. With Acrobat 5.0 PDFs, the abil­ity to do edit­ing is improved.

One of the new serv­ers as announced yes­ter­day, the Adobe Doc­u­ment Server 5.0, per­mits PDF to EPS gen­er­a­tion on a server. You can feed CMYK high res­ol­u­tion PDFs to the server, and it can feed back CMYK EPSs for place­ment into QuarkX­press et al.

I recall speak­ing to an Adobe exec­ut­ive in 2000 about “get­ting in the server space”. Now we have many!.