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.