www.nickhodge.com

Wel­come to Acrobat 6.0. Over the past couple of weeks I have been work­ing on this doc­u­ment: Acrobat 6.0 Pro­fes­sional: Graph­ics, Print, Prepress Overview

On the Adobe web site, Acrobat Solu­tions for cre­at­ive pro­fes­sion­als is the area that con­tains print/prepress spe­cific features.

Hello, Adelaide and Perth!
GASAA PDF for Print, Oct Nov 2002 Jan 2003

Adobe Pho­toshop 7.0.x AltiVec­Core Update plug-in

Slowly get­ting back up to speed pub­lish­ing inform­a­tion here: InDes­ign 2.0: Text and the Trans­par­ency Flattener. This topic describes how to solve the incon­sist­ent look­ing text when print­ing from InDes­ign 2.0

As a self con­fessed, out and act­ive Geek, there has always been one aspect of my geek­ish­ness that is con­flict with the under­stood norm: I don’t get Lord of the Rings. Actu­ally, I just don’t get the whole fantasy books/movies genre. It does noth­ing for me. There­fore, this thread on Straight­dope Avril sent to me tickled my fancy!

You learn lots of cool stuff on The His­tory Channel.

Eilmer of Malmes­bury was born in about 980 AD, and is best remembered for mak­ing a flight from the tower of Malmes­bury Abbey in 1010 AD when he was a young monk there. The account of this exploit can be found in Wil­liam of Malmesbury’s book Gesta Regum Anglorum.

Prepres­sure

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!.

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.

InDes­ign 2.0: Print­ing Out­put Choices and Flattener Tricks (includ­ing force Grey­scale export!)

Fixed a bogus logic error in my code; made images that linked to other places (img wrapped in a href). Sorry.

I’ve just com­pleted the final part of my tri­logy on InDes­ign 2.0, Spot Col­ours and output.

Part 1: InDes­ign 2.0: Gen­er­at­ing Com­pos­ite, Trapped PDFs

Part 2: InDes­ign 2.0: Spot Col­ors, Transparency

Part 3: InDes­ign 2.0: Pho­toshop with Spots, InDes­ign and Com­pos­ite PDF
If you look at , you will see google searches that have arrived here. Every now and then someone search­ing for “Moon­shine Dis­tilling” hits my site. Sadly for them, it has abso­lutely noth­ing to do with illegal alco­hol pro­duc­tion in stills.

For those inter­ested in get­ting high qual­ity prin­ted out­put from InDes­ign, GASAA, Adobe and Heidel­berg are present­ing a series of ses­sions in Sydney, Mel­bourne and Bris­bane in early July. Please visit the GASAA events page to register. Free.