Seybold: Going With the PDF Flow

Anita Dennis

The Internet may be a source of tremendous information, but as Seybold conference goers learned Wednesday morning in San Francisco, the best source of information is often one’s peers — in this case, a few hundred designers, publishers, and prepress types who gathered throughout the day to exchange stories, ideas, and information about using Acrobat PDF in the print production workflow. As prepress consultant David Zwang told a roomful of conference goers Wednesday morning, “PDF is a very important format. There’s a need to get a good handle on it because if there’s a problem we have to deal with it.” As the world begins to adopt and accept revolutionary content on new forms of media — from e-books to wireless Internet appliances — and these forms of publishing all converge, Zwang said, “we need the flexibility of PDF.”

Attendees discussed everything from broad issues that are inhibiting PDF adoption to specific problems with existing workflows, such as how to work with Kanji fonts. A show of hands indicated that only about 10 percent of the morning audience uses a PDF print-production workflow at least 40 percent of the time. In contrast, Zwang said, PDF use is much higher in the “e-paper” arena, where it’s used for corporate document exchange. “PDF use has been growing by leaps and bounds” by that audience, he said.

But one drawback of widespread adoption of PDF in prepress quickly became clear: Designers don’t know how to distill clean PDF files. Panelist Owen Wooding, vice president of technology at Eastern Rainbow, a $16 million commercial printer in New England, said he uses PDF with 90 percent of jobs, including four-color work. “We never have problems,” Wooding said. “We were one of the first prepress houses to push PDF as a four-color format for printing.”

Here’s why Wooding’s company doesn’t run into PDF problems: Eastern Rainbow receives application files such as QuarkXPress from clients and then generates the PDF in-house. “I just don’t have time to run around and teach people how to do PDF right,” he said, adding that his clients often use a stable of freelancers who are difficult to locate, much less teach. And, he said, “They have to want to learn it.”

Thom Cameron, vice president and general manager of InSync Media in Orange County, California, told a similar tale. His shop uses PDF workflow quite successfully with 30 to 40 percent of jobs. But like Eastern Rainbow, InSync Media also generates the PDF in-house. “Even though the PDF workflow is pretty much bulletproof, our clients are reluctant to use it,” he said. In particular, he said, they want conventional color proofs and bluelines.

But Cameron said that PDF-based prepress offers tremendous benefits, from a smoother workflow to smaller files to easier last-minute edits because prepress operators don’t have to make changes in a job’s original application. “PDF reduces our labor and materials by 50 percent,” Cameron said. Some of those savings are passed on to clients, “and we all benefit,” he added.

Cameron acknowledged that clients have to be brought onboard to support PDF workflows by distilling the files themselves if the technology is to become pervasive; indeed he is going to start accepting PDF files from a regular client within a few weeks. “The only way it works,” he cautioned, “is that the high-res images are prepared by us first, before they’re placed in the layout.”

“It’s not hard to get customers to make PDF, it’s hard to get them to make it right,” echoed prepress consultant Lerrick Starr. Low-res color (72-dpi) for print-destined PDF files was the biggest problem he said he usually encounters; all other problems, such as missing fonts or typos on a page, can be fixed. “There really are enough tools out there to do a good job in Acrobat,” he said.

Indeed, show-goers were introduced to a plethora of new Acrobat plug-ins and standalone tools. Some of the new PDF products being shown on the floor include:

• Enfocus Software introduced PitStop Professional, a standalone application that replaces and builds on the company’s PitStop plug-in. The Pro version of PitStop now lets users make global changes to documents; supports ICC-based color management; and includes a feature called File Scrubbing, which removes unwanted metadata (such as hyperlinks) from PDF files. It is available for $399; PitStop Server, Enfocus’s automated preflight tool, has been upgraded to include all of the capabilities in the Professional version and is available for $999.
• CreoScitex showed PDF Seps2Comp 1.5, a plug-in that lets users merge pre-separated PDF files in full-color composite documents. The upgrade features a new preview feature and the capability to examine plates in a CreoScitex Prinergy workflow.
• Apago showed a new module for its Piktor plug-in. The Raster to PDF module, which costs $1,500, accepts and distills raster input, and combines CT/LW file sets into single PDF files.
• Helios announced PDF Handshake 2.0, which lets Distiller functionality run across all major Unix server platforms. Document creators working on Mac, Windows, or Unix workstations click “Print,” and the job is routed through a site’s Unix server running PDF Handshake. The job is then processed on a Macintosh running Helios Create PDF Server.
• Lantana announced that PDF ImageWorks is poised to ship. The plug-in lets users edit images within PDF files, including making color conversions, adjusting color balance, downsampling, moving and resizing images, and rotating and extracting images. It lists for $295.