www.nickhodge.com

GASAA PDF for Print, Oct Nov 2002 Jan 2003

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!.

Hello from Chen­nai, India. News of the day: Print21 Online: PDF is pre­ferred print pro­duc­tion format. These stat­ist­ics are from the Aus­tralian market.

On hol­i­days as of 5.30pm AEST. For the first time in 5 years, this hol­i­day is going to be without con­nec­tion to email and the mobile phone turned off. Now let’s see how long I can go without the laptop and con­nec­tion to the ‘net.

Tools and Strategies for Auto­matic Gen­er­a­tion of PDF Files on PlanetPDF.

Have you noticed that the music of KISS, Led Zep­plin and other bands sound bet­ter the older you get?

Another inter­est­ing InDes­ign 2.0 dis­cov­ery this week. I’ll write up a doc­u­ment about this once I get my head around the implic­a­tions — and can cre­ate some rel­ev­ant screen dumps.

Many RIPs (and not just older RIPs) have sig­ni­fic­ant per­form­ance issues with images that are rotated, scaled (espe­cially in dif­fer­ent % in X and Y dimen­sions) and cropped into small clip­ping paths. RIPs have some intens­ive math­em­at­ical trans­form­a­tions to out­put these images to plates/film at very high res­ol­u­tion (2400dpi/133lpi) — tak­ing inor­din­ate amounts of time to gen­er­ate sep­ar­a­tions. Nor­mally, the work­flow is to ensure that all images placed into your lay­out are pre-rotated and scaled. With InDes­ign, by for­cing an early change such as this you are los­ing the bene­fits of flex­ible, late-stage edit­ing work­flow. How­ever, how do you solve the RIP time issue?

What I (and Matt) found is another “side effect” of the trans­par­ency flattener. Prior to apply­ing a trans­par­ency effect, it pre-rotates, scales and clips images at print/export PDF time. There­fore, we can use the spe­cial “set the frame to 99.9% Nor­mal trans­par­ency” tech­nique to force an image through the flattener without chan­ging the under­ly­ing image. (ref: InDes­ign 2.0: Print­ing Out­put Choices and Flattener Tricks (includ­ing force Grey­scale export!)) It is import­ant to apply the trans­par­ency on the frame. Where this really works well is in extremely large images.

The end res­ult is a smal­ler file, that RIPs extremely fast. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief — trans­par­ency can sig­ni­fic­antly improve RIP time.

I stand cor­rec­ted. At the recent InDes­ign for Prepress event with GASAA and Heidel­berg, I said there were no RIPs in the mar­ket­place that sup­por­ted nat­ive trans­par­ency in PDFs. I was wrong.

I’ve just spent some time with Kim from the CPI Group — the sell the Fuji­film Cel­eb­rant Extreme RIP in Aus­tralia. From InDes­ign 2.0 I was able to export Acrobat 5.0 PDFs — where trans­par­ency isn’t flattened and have the RIP gen­er­ate the cor­rect separations/plates. This included spot col­ours, layer-masked Pho­toshop files, drop shad­ows and feath­er­ing. To say the least, I was impressed with the output.

The bene­fit of this style of nat­ive export as Acrobat 5.0 PDF is that export­ing from InDes­ign 2.0 is extremely quick. Nor­mally when mak­ing an Acrobat 4.0 PDF, print­ing or export­ing EPS — InDes­ign invokes the trans­par­ency flattener to cor­rectly cre­ate the trans­par­ent effects. As Acrobat 5.0 can hold these trans­par­ency set­tings in the PDF nat­ively, there is no need to flat­ten. The Fuji­film RIP just ate these PDFs, and gen­er­ate sep­ar­a­tions that looked just as good as the print Post­script (with flat­ten­ing) into the RIP. This RIP imple­ments the CPSI 3015.102 engine from Adobe. wow

From Kim stated, there are some cus­tom­ers in Aus­tralia with this level of RIP in production.

Over the next couple of months, I will try the same tests with other vendor’s RIPs and work­flow to see where they are up to in comparison.

New art­icle: InDes­ign 2.0: Gen­er­at­ing Com­pos­ite, Trapped PDFs

I’ve just read on a forum that “Adobe says that PDF can­not handle spot col­ours.” (To not embarass the poster, I won’t detail where) This is so wrong.

PDFs for Onscreen Presentations

The 3DAP (PDF Guidelines for Magazine Advert­ising Deliv­ery) (Digital Advert­ising Deliv­ery for Aus­tralian Pub­lic­a­tions) has been updated.

Now this is way Cool.Online Lego. Now I’ll never get any­thing done at work. At least it won’t be as noisy as the real stuff.

And speak­ing of cool­ness in toys, The Pro­peller­heads have announced an updated to Reason. For music makers, this has to be one of the greatest, simplest yet most power­ful com­puter music cre­ation around.