Flashing Personal PDFs

When Adobe paid $3.4 billion for Macromedia in 2005, it sounded the death knell for Freehand, longtime rival to Adobe's Illustrator vector drawing application. Of greater strategic importance, it turns out, was the acquisition of Flash. The ubiquitous engine for Internet-based delivery of everything from text to video has proven impossible to marginalize. Flash reaches more than 90% of installed Web browsers. Although Adobe's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) plug-in had its share of fans, it never penetrated more than 10% of the market.

Adobe has parlayed its investment into a standalone Flash authoring tool as well as Flash-enabled tools in Creative Suite 3's DreamWeaver, Fireworks and Device Central applications. Pushing the potential impact of this rich-media platform even further is the firm's decision to bake the full Flash runtime engine into the new Acrobat 9 Professional and Acrobat Reader 9 products, releasing this month. Aside from making the popular Flash Video Player available from within any PDF file, the inclusion of this rich media feature makes a substantial impact on the creation and deployment of PDF files. Yes, you can still ignore Flash and export non-interactive PDFs, but it's easy to see ways this rich-media player might change graphic communication in premedia workflows.

Acrobat 9 documents can include multiple files presented as a single “portfolio.” Unlike Acrobat 8's simplistic PDF Package, this portfolio is controlled by a snazzy and capable Flash-based interface. While the new Acrobat includes several basic templates, users can also create their own sophisticated interfaces using Adobe's Flash, Flex or ActionScript 3. This flexibility makes it possible to submit data from electronic forms, pull live data feeds from RSS sources or present any Flash-compatible file without prior conversion to PDF.

Not impressed by such Flash-y talk? Acrobat 9 Professional also includes numerous print-centric upgrades, including preflighting to the latest PDF/X specifications as well as improvements to overprint rendering, color conversion and a new Output Preview dialog box. These new features show that Adobe intends to maintain PDF's dominance in traditional premedia production. (No sign of the infamous “Print to Kinko's” button in Reader 9!)

Converting PDFs into hard-copy proofs, film or plates traditionally requires a raster image processor (RIP), but users of Adobe's new PDF Print Engine 2 can skip the RIP. Previous-generation RIPs were built to parse PostScript input, but PDF Print Engine users can absorb the interpreted object lists contained within every PDF directly into their imaging workflow. Eschewing the legendary Configurable PostScript Interpreter (CPSI), Print Engine systems rely on the Adobe Common Renderer to parse, flatten and rasterize PDF data.

Driven by Job Definition Format (JDF) job tickets and capable of trapping, color management and screening, the PDF Print Engine is a technology available for OEM partners to integrate within their newest digital front ends. Current systems that utilize Adobe's Print Engine 1.0 technology include Agfa ApogeeX 4.0, Fujifilm XMF 1.0, Heidelberg Prinect Metadimension 6.5, Kodak Prinergy 4.0, Kodak NexPress V Frontend, Screen Trueflow SE and the Xanté Symphony 2.0 workflow.

The page-independent nature of the PDF format allows Adobe's Print Engines to scale the number of processors for demanding applications such as complex variable-data jobs. Working in parallel, a potentially unlimited number of Adobe Common Renderers can output even the largest documents at high speed. Recognizing the variable data opportunities that are enabled by the new generation of inkjet web presses, Adobe has added a significant feature to PDF Print Engine 2: Xobject caching.

Like the forms cache feature in PostScript Level 2's “optimized PostScript,” PDF files have the ability to store repeating graphics (forms, in PostScript-speak) to reduce print file size and speed processing. (The first release of PDF Print Engine was unable to recognize and store these repeating graphics for later processing.) Print Engine 2 can and does cache forms that become accessible across all of its processors; at the second instantiation of a previously defined XObject, PDF Print Engine 2 notifies that cache management system to store the rasters for later reuse. Just as importantly, PDF Print Engine 2 can now render external XObjects—a feature typically available only in high-end variable data print languages.

Adobe is demonstrating the importance it now places on variable data and transactional workflows by actively supporting the development of the new ISO standard PDF/VT (Portable Document Format/Variable, Transactional), seen as the open-platform successor to PPML/VDX. “This is PDF for VDP,” says Mark Lewiecki, senior product manager for the PDF Print Engine. “In the future, InDesign will be able to generate these VDP-optimized PDFs.”

ONLINE: Reach the author at hal@halhinderliter.com