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.
Adobe Acrobat Reader and Forms Data without Custom CGI. This has been in progress for a while – so its good to get this technique published.
InDesign 2.0: Adding Tab to Table Cells. Pretty esoteric. There is a MacOS version here Add Tab to Cell Contents Script (MacOS .sit from adobeevangelists.com)
Thanks to Tim Cole’s perstering, InDesign 2.0: Pasting As Text Only on Windows is a Windows version of Paste as Text Only (MacOS .sit from adobeevangelists.com). Don’t thank me, thank Tim.
New article: InDesign 2.0: Photoshop to InDesign workflow
According to Fortune Magazine, Adobe is the 5th best place to work in the US: Adobe Systems No. 5
Camaraderie is the byword at this Silicon Valley stalwart known for its graphics products: frequent all-hands meetings, job rotations, Friday night beer bashes. Three-week paid sabbaticals every five years.
My comments: Adobe’s history has cemented a dichotomous industrial/company culture. It is a technology oriented company that has a strange mix of “sales orientation” (results are important) and “innovation culture” (smart engineers making cool products). Out here in the boonies (that is, not the US) we do not have beer bashes, cannot job rotate and hope to last 5 years to get that sabbatical! That said, it’s still a great place to work.
I posted the following on Thursday, 18 July 2002. In light of today’s announcements by Apple: Keynote, Safari etc its interesting to see that this is starting to come true.
Thursday, 18 July 2002: 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 (alias Yellow Box, alias NeXT frameworks) environment. The key to the volume of application production.
It is not surprising that Apple has “created” a new browser, it wants to control its own destiny. A browser should be a part of the operating system and are commodity applications. Created is an interesting comment, when in fact they have coopted some Open Source (Konqueror) HTML rendering code. Expect the browser component to be a part of the Cocoa framework, too. Developers will be able to place a robust HTML rendering element into their applications that is supported and maintained by Apple.
Whilst IE still has a bulk of the browser public (95% hitting this web site are from IE5 or greater), there is a fragmentation of the “last 5%” into micro-marketshare browsers such as Opera, Mozilla, Netscape and now Safari. Since the browser wars of the late 1990’s, there has been stagnation as far as browser innovation is concerned.
Anyone from Melbourne who reads this: a humble apology. Yes, I was meant to be in Melbourne today. Due to an error in the first email that was sent out, I read and therefore assumed* (there’s that lovely word) that the PDF: Beyond the Basics event was scheduled for Thursday. It wasn’t. I am in error. Thankfully, we can still hold the event on Thursday 12th December at the Holiday Inn. If you were caught up in this confusion and have been inconvenienced, please email me.
*assume - 1436, "to receive up into heaven" (especially of the Virgin Mary), from L. assumere "to take up," from ad- "to, up" + sumere "to take." Early pp. was assumpt. Meaning "to suppose" is first recorded 1598. In rhetorical usage, assume expresses what the assumer postulates, often as a confessed hypothesis; presume expresses what the presumer really believes. From Online Etymology Dictionary
This is getting scary. Now there are Starbucks appearing overnight. Corner of Miller St and Pacific Hwy North Sydney, near the office in Westfield Chatswood and York St in the city near Wynyard. According to their web site, there are 36 stores in Australia. Surprisingly, they’ve invaded the heart of high quality Italian-Australian coffee – Lygon Street in Carlton Melbourne. Even the smallest storefront in Australia already serves great coffee – why are they bothering? Who wants to pollute their caffeine in hot water with cinnamon?
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.
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.