Author: Nick Hodge

PDF Generation

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.

Posted on Author Nick HodgeCategories pdf

InDesign 2.0 Prepress Issue

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.

Adobe Tips

As promised, I am starting to document the techniques shown at the recent Adobe roadshows

Illustrator 10: Illustrator 10: Making Good Text Go Bad. Photoshop 7: Photoshop 7 File Browser Automatic Numbering Technique

Apart from writing the above articles, I decided to noodle around with the GD library that is a part of PHP4. GD permits the dynamic changing of images programmatically, rather than having to do it by hand in an image editing tool. In my example, the code is grabbing a random Neil Finn lyric from the Random Neil Finn Lyric Server. The end result looks like this:

http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordsimageengine.php

The text is gathered from a SOAP stream, and composited on top of another dynamically served image.

OK, I have another confession. I absolutely cannot miss an episode of Meet the Osbournes. Its partly the fact that this dysfunctional family seems to work, a Simpsons in real life. Ozzy, obviously suffering from too many non-natural substances in too great quantity, is really a pussy cat. This persona belies his 30-plus years of a proto-high priest of the dark side. The irony of seeing Ozzy go bananas over his noisy neighbours is delicious. What a riot.

RSS implemented on mungenetengine

Thanks for the morning diversion, Chris. The RSS 0.92 Feed feed is now correct.

One of the pleasures of all this travel for Adobe is being able to visit my favourite place in the world – west coast of the North Island of New Zealand. At the beginning of the current roadshow, I took Jane Brady and Tim Cole to Piha and Kare Kare: Tim Cole, Jane Brady and Nick Hodge in New Zealand

InDesign and InRIP Separation of PDFs

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.

Thoughts

Something I remember thinking, if not saying, was that the whole NeXT heritage of easier software development tools was going to give Apple a significant competitive advantage with software. We are seeing a plethora of MacOS X based “digital hub” (or digital lifestyle) mini-applications tied to a web-services style backed (.mac) I am sure all of these, being MacOS X native, use the Cocoa (aliasYellow Box, alias NeXT frameworks) environment. The key to the volume of application production.

SMS Blog Entry

This is a blog posted via SMS and tapped in on a keypad.

This is another email experiment. I’ve converted my code to transport
the data on the server-side code over to SOAP so that the
application is a little more structured. Feels different, doesn’t it?