by Tatyana Sinioukov
Seybold Seminars program director Thad McIlroy, Arcadia House, highlights key issues of PDF workflows
Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), the new golden child of the publishing industry, was a hot topic at Seybold in San Francisco in September. As PDF workflows are being implemented in various ways by industry pioneers, many agree that PDF stands a very good chance of becoming the standard for digital workflows in the near future.
PDF, says Thad McIlroy, president of the San Francisco-based Arcadia House and program director, Seybold Seminars, will have a profound impact on the efficiency and profitability of workflows.
A major advantage of PDF for the CTP workflow is that it allows for processing of pages independently of one another, he points out. Eventually, with the emergence of a new generation of RIPs that would accept PDF files directly, it would be possible, for example, to split up long documents and feed them to multiple RIPs.
According to McIlroy, Adobe originally created PDF as a non-print format--intended primarily for screen display.
"In its first conception--and it's still true today--PDF has the advantage that what you see in print can be preserved with absolute fidelity," he explains. "That kind of fidelity has tremendous appeal to a design-conscious world. Initially, there was a lot of excitement."
"With the emergence of the Web, it became clear that the optimal form for online viewing is not the same as the optimal form for print viewing." Some find, says McIlroy, that HTML is a more user-friendly format for onscreen viewing. To strengthen the PDF file format's utility online, Adobe added a number of different tools for online viewing, some of which are index-oriented, some of which are multimedia-oriented.
As the print industry adopted PDF, these features were carried over, too and they make PDF more flexible for multiple types of uses than any other format, says McIlroy.
Another key benefit of PDF, says McIlroy, is PostScript file "sanitization." When Adobe Acrobat's Distiller module converts a PostScript file to PDF, it in effect rewrites a file into a more formal structure that tends to output more dependably.
Such sanitization, he says, "regularizes PS, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the regularized PS will now be RIPable," says McIlroy. So PDF is hardly a complete panacea for production problems. "If you have what we affectionately refer to as a 'file from hell' in the PS world, whether that's a particularly difficult QuarkXPress file or perhaps one that you've converted to PS," says McIlroy, "simply putting it in PDF does not guarantee that it will be smooth and happy and well-behaved."
Though use of PDF does not guarantee that a file will run, it can eliminate many surprises. "It's my impression, although it is based on limited data, that if you had a hundred RIP-crashing files out of QuarkXPress, maybe two-thirds of them would function smoothly in PDF, but a third would still be RIP-crashers."
That's partly because it is still possible for inexperienced users to create and send PDF files that contain missing fonts and bad PS, notes McIlroy.
"The problem of missing graphics is addressed 100 percent as far as I can see. (For) the fonts, you do need to have the correct settings. You need to embed the fonts and avoid subsetting them," he notes. It is possible to send files without fonts embedded, and there are different versions of them, which complicates successful output. McIlroy predicts that solutions to font-management issues will be part of subsequent releases of Adobe Acrobat software.
In fact, most problems with PDF will most likely be addressed by the industry soon, says McIlroy. "The list is not so much long as it contains some really key items."
For example, he says, "When you come to something like trapping a PDF file--if we don't address that, 90 percent of prepress shops and prepress departments are going to say, 'Forget it.'"
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