Adobe has announced version five of its PDF print engine, APPE 5, which it says can render graphically rich jobs across flat and contoured surfaces including paper, plastic, fabric, metal, ceramic, glass, and food products.
Adobe says “The new system offers high-speed edge enhancement, including 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.
“It has enhanced Unicode support, including 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.
“The PDF 2.0 print feature support includes 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.
“With 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
Desribing APPE as the leading rendering technology at the heart of prepress workflows in the US$900bn 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 color imaging and predictable results every step of the way.”
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