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© 2000 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
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This article accompanies one of the feature presentations at CorelWORLD 2000 on the use and creation of PDF files.
We note with both amusement and dismay the fact that Adobe’s Portable Document File format continues to suffer through a bad reputation among many of the more casual members of the electronic publishing community. After all, the PDF format—or Acrobat format, to use its commercial name—was born and originally bred for purposes far removed from professional publishing. It was the tool you used when you wanted to show the way a Word or WordPerfect document would look, or how your resume would appear, or maybe the invitation to your six-year-old’s swim party.
In its early days, Acrobat would make half-hearted attempts to get colors accurate and conspicuously weak efforts to get typefaces right. And accuracy in both departments was judged on how the document looked on screen, not on how it printed.
A few years later, by the mid-1990s, several applications (including CorelDRAW) offered a PDF Writer choice on its export or print menus. This was a little freebie application that produced results about on par with screen capture programs. It was nothing at all like creating a press-ready print file, but it came around at the same time that several industry pundits were beginning to discuss the PDF format as a pre-press front-end. People took one look at the files created by the hapless PDF Writer and they are still running. Mention PDF to them and they’ll duck and cower. Or they’ll laugh…
Have we just described you? Or have you not yet gotten around to paying much attention to Adobe Acrobat? In either case, it’s time you did—otherwise, you might soon feel as if the world is passing you by.
The Adobe Acrobat format began as a simple proofing device, as a way to show others how a document looks, even if they do not own the application that created the document. You could create an advertising spread in CorelDRAW, create a PDF file from it, and then send that file to others, without regard for whether or not they own CorelDRAW. They need only to be able to open the PDF file, which quickly became as routine as opening a TXT file in Notepad.
Adobe Acrobat is about a $150 purchase, and the application within the product that creates PDF files is called Distiller. Today, users of Distiller 3.0 or Acrobat 4.0 can do much more than just replicate the appearance of a document:
Figure 1: You might not own CorelDRAW or the typefaces we used, but you can still see and print our brochure exactly, thanks to Acrobat. |
In other words, not only can a PDF file show how a document is to look, it can also tell precisely how a document should print. It is a full-service pre-press engine. Figure 1 shows the cover of the CorelWORLD brochure in both CorelDRAW and Acrobat. We created it in CorelDRAW; we sent it to our service bureau as a PDF file.
This is all possible when you own the commercial version of Acrobat, as opposed to the el cheapo PDF Writer that many applications offer as a free substitute. (It is also attainable, with a few conditions, by users of CorelDRAW 9 and its Publish to PDF command; details in the presentation). Figure 2 shows you the various pages of the Acrobat Job Options dialog—you can see the wealth of pre-press choices available.
Figure 2: PDF is now serious business, with robust controls for handling pre-press work from thousand-page one-color books to multiple-signature glossy magazines. |
PDF owes its appeal and success to the fact that, at its core, it is 100% USDA-choice PostScript, just like the print files you used to make. It is not some mysterious printer control language that works in some obtuse way—it uses the same calls, the same commands, the same sub-routines, the same typeface-handling method, the same everything as a PostScript print file. Yet PDF journeys well beyond the myopic world of the print file:
You can view it: With a print file, you’re flying blind when you send it to your service bureau, and if there is a problem with the file, you usually don’t know if until you have received, and paid for, your film output. But a PDF file is viewable by both the commercial version and the free Reader application, so you get a chance to perform a pre-flight check on your output before you send it off. Your SB gets a chance to do the same, and if there is a problem with your output, chances are good that a savvy SB operator will detect it, recognize it, and be able to describe it to you.
You can correct it: If you or your SB spots a typo, it can actually be corrected with current versions of Acrobat. Assuming that you downloaded the entire character set of the typeface (as opposed to instructing Acrobat to download only those characters that were used), you can activate a text tool, drop your cursor into a line of text, and change it. Editing is limited to line-by-line changes and there is no text-wrap, but for simple typos, this could save an entire round of RIPing.
You can forget about print drivers: When you create a traditional print file, it is as if you are in possession of the printer or imagesetter. You print from the application, using the specified print driver or PPD file, but you send all of the data to a file instead of to the output device itself. When you turn over that file, you are 100% accountable for its success, and you had better hope you configured the output settings correctly. This is often a troubling notion, because in many cases, you have never even laid eyes on the device and have no clue how a print driver actually works.
But with a PDF file, you are responsible only for creating the PostScript code. The operators at your SB then take over the job of sending the code to the output device (i.e. they open the PDF file in Acrobat and print from there). This is a much better division of labor—they are probably more familiar with the device; it should be their job to arrange correct communication with it. You worry about creating the content and you focus on the Acrobat settings, but you let the SB deal with the actual printer configuration.
No separations or trapping to worry about: With a traditional print file for a color job, you typically create the print data in an already-separated state. If there are any trapping issues, you’d better know how to address them and fix them, because after that, you’ll be on your own. PDF files are typically sent as composite files—all colors in one file. Again, your SB is responsible for sending the data to output, so it handles the separations, not you. Perhaps more important, your SB can use some of the sophisticated trapping software available today (designed to work only on composite files), eliminating entirely the whole issue of registration errors and how to minimize their impact.
In its most automatic state, creating a PDF file is a simple matter of printing: You print to the Acrobat Distiller driver and a few moments later (10 seconds to 10 minutes, depending upon the job), a PDF file bearing the same name as the document appears in a location on your hard drive (the default location is “PDF Folder” under the main Acrobat folder). This seems like magic, and there is no magic allowed in this presentation, so we are going to identify exactly what goes on during this process.
1. PostScript code produced
The Distiller driver is a PostScript print driver, so the first event that takes place is the creation of the PostScript code that describes the page or pages. It is relatively generic PostScript, with no specific knowledge of the ultimate output device (i.e. it doesn’t know what the bleed limit is, if there is a dead zone around the edge, or arcane facts like some imagesetters not using Landscape, but instead Transverse Portrait). You’ll get a chance later in the process to use printer-specific settings.
2. Acrobat Distiller started
Even though you might not see it, printing to the Distiller driver automatically activates Distiller and the PostScript code is sent to it. Once done, Distiller…well, distills the file. It compacts it way down, and it transforms the PostScript code into a viewable package. This package is saved as a PDF file.
3. PDF file opened in Acrobat
The other main application in the standard Acrobat product is the program formerly known as Exchange (and now simply called Acrobat), capable of opening, viewing, and printing a PDF file. When your service bureau prints a PDF file from Acrobat (or when you do to one of your printers), it is then that a particular printer configuration is used—just as if you were printing directly to that printer from Word, VENTURA Publisher, CorelDRAW, or Xpress.
There are various degrees of automation that you can bring to this process, and at its most automatic, it does seem almost magical. On the other side of the spectrum, you can tell CorelDRAW to print the PostScript code to a file. Then you can start Distiller and open the file to distill it. While more steps, we prefer this route because you first get a chance to adjust the settings. We really like the Watched Folders feature, and show exactly how it works in the presentation.
If you experimented with DRAW 8’s Export to PDF feature, you may well be thinking once burned, twice shy. That PDF export filter was—how shall we say—awful!
But the Publish to PDF engine in 9 is different. It is not a rewrite of the DRAW 8 filter, but a completely new engine built by Corel for Corel from the ground up. It purports to create PDF files as well as Adobe Acrobat, and Corel’s claim for it has teeth—it works. We have found Publish to PDF to be very convenient, a great display of technology, and…almost perfect.
When it performs as expected, it is every bit as good as Adobe Acrobat (it does not achieve the same level of compression, but that is immaterial to the core issue of output quality, accuracy, and pre-press worthiness). And it is easier to use—you essentially perform an export and CorelDRAW does everything else for you.
Its problems are mostly related to its status as a rookie, and we look forward to watching it evolve. Issues that we know of include:
Acrobat files give CorelDRAW an additional opportunity to show off. So far, the discussion has been about going from CorelDRAW to PDF. Corel’s import filters are so good, you can go in the other direction, also. In our estimation, CorelDRAW 9 is without peer when it comes to importing PostScript files. We don’t just mean the simple placement of EPS files; we refer to the ability to read and interpret the PostScript code and create editable objects and images from it. CorelDRAW does that better than any other application (most don’t even try).
Figure 3: CorelDRAW can suck in PDF files as easily as it can spit churn them out. |
And this capability extends to PDF files (because after all, they are PostScript at their core). You can import a PDF file and ask CorelDRAW to interpret its various elements and offer them to you as a set of editable objects. Figure 3 might look a lot like Figure 1, but it is actually precisely the opposite: We pulled this PDF file from the Web and then imported it into CorelDRAW, with all text remaining editable and all other objects taking their rightful vector or bitmap forms. When we show this at the presentation, prepare to have your jaw drop.
We’ll show you a lot more, too. Acrobat has proven to be one of the most flexible formats around for carting documents from one place to the next. We are continually finding new ways to use the technology and the format. It’s no wonder an entire industry has popped up around it. Hmmm, we wonder if it isn’t time for AcrobatWORLD…?
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Copyright 2000, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in...
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Mastering CorelDRAW 9
