PDF All Aboard?

Maybe we have an answer to all our prepress problems.

It's called PDF. That's short for Portable Document Format. It's Adobe's file format.

It's not difficult to grasp the basic principles of what PDF is all about. But it takes more than the page I have here, so please go read our related stories, then come back. All done? Good.

(OK, for those of you who hate to flip pages, you should at least know that a PDF file can be made from a PostScript file. PostScript is the final format of a file made with Adobe's PageMaker or Illustrator programs and Quark's QuarkXPress, among others.)

So, you see why it's so exciting, and why there's such enthusiasm. Clearly, PDF offers many clear advantages, so many that people are already using it successfully.

If it works for all of us, it's going to be really wonderful.

Since it was a format not originally designed for high-end four-color prepress, there are many issues to work out, specifically concerning maintaining or adding trapping or spot-color information, and a few other concerns.

We're going to have to rely on the technical folks to understand the problems, then let us know if they can be fully overcome or consistently worked around. Even as this issue is going to press, surely software engineers are hammering out solutions.

But the solutions are not just related to software problems. They depend on cooperation between leading systems vendors.

With the prickly relationship between Quark and Adobe, particularly since Quark's startling offer to buy Adobe (Adobe said no) and Adobe's plans to release a new and better page layout program, for now called K2, which one would assume will compete with QuarkXPress--what is going to happen?

The answer is that no one knows. But we're certainly all on the edges of our seats.