Adobe has announced version five of its PDF print engine, or APPE 5.
Describing APPE as the leading rendering technology at the heart of prepress workflows in the US$900bn ($1323bn) print industry, Adobe says this new version extends PDF Print Engine’s colour reproduction with new capabilities to harness the full potential of today’s digital and conventional presses.
Ongoing innovations in ink and inkjet heads have created opportunities to print on new surfaces and Adobe says the PDF Print Engine 5 will make the most of colour impact in the coming generation of textile presses, industrial print stations, and digital presses for label and packaging production.
Adil Munshi, vice president and general manager at the Print and Publishing Business Unit for Adobe, says, “Brand managers count on accurate reproduction of vibrant designs to connect with customers.
“Print jobs that are authored in Adobe Creative Cloud, reviewed in Adobe Acrobat DC, and proofed and output by Adobe PDF Print Engine 5 will now deliver the fastest rendering, best-of-breed colour imaging and predictable results every step of the way.”
The company adds that designers continue to push the creative envelope with the latest functionality in Adobe Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC, resulting in graphically rich jobs that have become increasingly complex to print. Adobe says PDF Print Engine 5 can precisely render these graphically rich jobs for printing on flat and contoured surfaces including paper, plastic, fabric, metal, ceramic, glass, and food products. The new colour features in PDF Print Engine 5 strengthen support for expanded colour gamut digital presses with ink-sets that go beyond the four-color base of cyan, magenta, yellow and black to magnify the visual and tactile effect of brand messaging.
Adobe lists the new features in PDF Print Engine 5:
- High-speed edge enhancement – Anti-aliasing for visually smoother edges on graphic objects, even at lower resolutions, reduces processing times to a fraction of the time compared to alternative and post-rendering methods
- Enhanced Unicode support – Control parameters, file paths and passwords now include multi-byte characters from non-Roman character sets, which increases ease-of-use in languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean
- PDF 2.0 print feature support – Black Point Compensation to preserve details in image shadow areas during colour conversions; CxF-defined spot colours (colour exchange format) to enable spectral-based colour management; HTO (half-tone origin) to align pre-imposed objects to the device pixel-grid, ensuring identical line-screens
- Page-level output intent – Colour conversions for multi-page PDF 2.0 jobs can be managed on a page-by-page basis, enabling greater flexibility and automation in prepress workflows
