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
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.
New article: InDesign 2.0: Generating Composite, Trapped PDFs