PDF Printing and Publishing:
The Next Revolution After Gutenberg
As the OEM Manager at 4-Sight, I develop relationships
with vendors who may use our products to enable transfer of
data to and from that vendors products. For example, I spend
a lot of my energy developing things like remote proofing
strategies, with our goal to make it as bullet proof as
faxing a document. Without a standard file format, it will
be chaos. In my view, Adobe has provided us with a way to
fully descibe a color document using the PDF file structure,
which can at this writing, permit us to view on screen and
print documents as the creator of that document intended.
More importantly, we can do this without making the file as
difficult to edit as a raster only page description. If you
are confused about this, try correcting the spelling of a
name on a bitmap image of a fax in PhotoShop. This is where
we are the high end color prepress industry today.
Indeed, some of us send Quark XPress documents, others
PostScript as "print to disk" files, some send proprietary
Scitex CT and LW files; many believe that raster files such
as TIFF/IT (similar in concept to sending bitmapped fax
data) may be the most reliable method. This hodgepodge of
file structures and stategies often require that the
recieving end of the file do things, sometimes heroic
things, to simply view the file, nevermind actually print
out the file. As there are no free Macintosh or Wintel
client applications that can even view a TIFF/IT file, I see
the TIFF/IT file structure as the format of choise when I
want to have an unscreened digital version of 4 color file,
just prior to imaging it onto some high resolution media
such as film or plates. Otherwise, PDF can do the job.
What the PDF file format promises is a future where we
can perform a blind transfer. As an industry, we need a way
to eliminate the ambiguity of exchanging color pages. We
need a way for the he creator, author or originator of a
color document to transfer that document while carrying all
the elements and entities that are required for that
document to achieve the inteneded results at the recievers
end, whithout heroic intervention at that reciecers site; in
essence, accomplish a reliable exchange of grapical color
data between the sender and the reciever.
When I discusssed this concept
with Jim Meehan, one of the Authors of the PDF
specifications at Adobe, I asked him pointedly (as I think
many of us would have) what the the main differences were
between PostScript and PDF, and why I should be confident in
PDF as the file structure that will lend itself to blind
transfers of color documents. What he explained was so
elegant, I simply had to give him credit for it, lest you
think I was so clever; he explained to me that that a
PostScript file is a "program", an actual application that
is created, sent and then run inside the PostScript RIP
(Raster Image Processor), and that a PDF file is more of an
"object database". When a PostScript file (or PostScript
application, more accurately) is run, the PostScript
commands are interpreted and then rasterized into a bitmap
and normally imaged to paper, film or plates. The objects
that describe graphical elements and entities in PostScript
are difficult to parse or otherwise find or extract. This is
where we are today with PostScript. Moreover, If you want to
make a simple edit, such as a spelling correction, you
normally need to go back to the original application file
that created it. Editing PostScript is not very straight
forward. In the case of PDF, this simply is not the case.
Using Adobe applications such as Exchange, one can make that
spelling correction on all the popular computer platforms,
and if Distiller was set up properly, without requiring you
to have the fonts!
In my view, this is the very first file format that
actually resolves the main problems we encounter in our
industries current prepress workflow. It is compact enough
to transmit efficiently, can be created, opened viewed and
edited without depending on a specific computer platform,
and in the case of simply viewing and printing, can be
accomplished using an application that can be downloaded for
free from Adobes web site (www.adobe.com).
Any advertising adgency, design firm, prepress service
provider, publisher or printing company can prove this to
themselves by aquiring the free Adobe Acrobat reader and
then downloading the facing page. Go to http://www.tool.net/friends/jahn/pdf3/cmyk.pdf,
and you can view and print this documnet (it is under 600k)
without a hitch. Go ahead. Open it and print it. If you have
any problems, email me at mikejahn@jahn.com.
I am confident that you will be suprised to learn just how
easy it works.
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