Six degrees of graphic PDF

Print Action, Feb 2003

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For printing to operate in a predictable environment the electronic content files must work in a consistent manner across all systems and applications. The two leading technologies behind this push are PDF and ICC colour management. The explosion of software behind these formats has changed the business of the graphic arts. But just what has changed and is there more to come? With questions provided by colour management specialist Brian Stewart, PrintAction magazine convened a virtual e-panel of PDF and ICC experts to find out.

What are the major hurdles to PDF expansion throughout the industry?

Bailey: Quite a few, but interestingly enough most have nothing to do with the PDF format itself, at least from version 1.3 onwards... while bad experiences from PDF 1.1 and 1.2 colour people's perceptions of whether PDF can be made to work the common problems aren't new to PDF. Missing fonts, images in uncharacterized RGB. Lots of the stuff that people can get wrong in PostScript translates directly into problems with PDF.

The industry has been in turmoil for a couple of years because Illustrator 9 could make PDF files with transparency way before most PDF tools could handle that properly. It'll be several years more before most prepress users have upgraded all their workflow tools to handle it. It doesn't help that older tools won't even realize that the transparency is there and render the file with opaque objects instead, and that different tools, even those from the same vendor, can produce very different final renderings from the same transparent file.

Scaffer: In my study, The PDF Era: PDF Usage in the Real World, 88 per cent of printers said that [files] were not made properly by clients and 64 per cent said that they were harder to edit than native files. Seybold's PDF Usage study confirms these as top issues. The top specific problems cited in both the GATF and Seybold studies include missing/unembedded fonts, resolution of images too low, no bleed on file and wrong colour space.

Now, problems with digital files are certainly not particular to PDF. It's the fact that PDF files are really more difficult to edit in many cases than native files that make some content receivers hesitant to go all out with a full PDF workflow. Adding bleed to a Quark document can be as simple as dragging the edges of elements outside the page trim. This is far more difficult to do to a PDF, and it requires a special Acrobat plug-in, like Enfocus Pitstop Pro.

Things that will reduce these hurdles are education and the adoption of standards. PDF/X-1a, for example, requires that all images are CMYK and that all fonts are embedded, eliminating two of the top specific problems immediately. However, lots of folks are not yet familiar with the PDF/X standard. The Seybold study says 12 per cent of respondents send or receive PDF/X files, so there too, education is key.

Hepditch: Document creators have jumped on this [technology] without understanding that the graphic arts industry has much higher standards for output than do Web sites or desktop printers. At this point, the main hurdle for PDF's wider adoption is inconsistent customer-supplied PDFs. This may include incorrect colour spaces, low-resolution images, fonts, bleeds and other problems in the creation of these files.

Although Adobe Acrobat Distiller can easily make a PDF, its original design was intended for document distribution. Recognizing that they must overcome this hurdle, many print providers have turned to solutions provided by manufacturers such as stand-alone normalizers to extend the workflow up into the design community.

Brown: A hurdle facing creative professionals is teaching them how to use [PDF] to its maximum potential. PDF has the ability to work as an interactive document, with links, bookmarks, multimedia attachments and so on. For the creative professional, there really is no other delivery platform that can bring so much in this type of compact format - a format that can be viewed and printed by nearly 500-million Acrobat Reader users around the world.

Bailey: Too many versions of PDF, too fast. Adobe is delivering new versions of PDF more or less every two years. The replacement cycle for expensive software installations in many prepress shops is more like four or five years. In the corporate marketplace a mismatch between the version of software used to make a PDF file and the version used to read it often doesn't matter very much, but it certainly matters in the graphic arts, where appearance is more important than the information content of the piece.

These points continue to destabilize the use of PDF in the graphic arts, so much so that PDF is simply not in many people's comfort zone right now, and too many people are swimming so hard just to stay above water at the moment that they don't have time to figure out why something didn't just work out of the box. Many prepress companies have already been through all this for PostScript and are understandably reluctant to do it again for PDF.