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Adobe's Portable Document Format offers benefits from prepress to production
ONE OF THE greatest challenges facing anyone in professional printing today is the complexity of the workflow itself. From the time a document is created to the time it is sent to the printer, a number of steps take place that can impact the final product. In addition, a document can travel from graphic designer to advertising agency to customer and back again before reaching the printer.
The Portable Document Format (PDF) was developed by Adobe to include all elements in a job file, compress the file and ensure the final output at the imagesetter matches both what the designer created on the desktop and what the proofer set up in the prepress department. As a device-independent document format designed for sharing, viewing and printing documents, a PDF file remains the same no matter what platform it is viewed or created on.
Based on the PostScript imaging model, PDF is a flexible, cross-platform, cross-application file format that accurately displays and preserves fonts, page layouts and other graphic elements in a document. Originally intended as a Web publishing format, PDF offers printers benefits throughout the entire workflow process. According to Michael Jahn, PDF evangelist, Agfa, these benefits include:
* Small, self-contained files.
* Fonts, images and graphics embedded within the document, streamlining electronic transmission and preflighting.
* Files that are independent of the platform, operating system and authoring application and are viewable on screen in Macintosh, Windows and UNIX environments.
* One consistent, predictable, reliable format that can be used for all documents.
* Files that are ideal for archival and retrieval.
Adobe lists several elements that combine in the PDF concept. These include:
* Adobe Acrobat, which includes PDF Writer and Distiller for creating...