Features Colour Control Premedia
Adobe PDF Print Engine 5 aims for high-impact colour rendering

Adobe this week announced version 5 of Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE 5), described as extending PDF Print Engine’s colour reproduction with new capabilities to harness the potential of digital and conventional presses.

With “ongoing innovations” in ink and inkjet heads, the company explains PDF Print Engine 5 is designed to maximize colour impact in the coming generation of textile presses, industrial print stations, and digital presses for label and packaging production — especially for printing on flat and contoured surfaces including paper, plastic, fabric, metal, ceramic, glass, and food products, it says. As well, the new colour features in PDF Print Engine 5 help strengthen support for Expanded Color Gamut (ECG) 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 explains.

The new features of PDF Print Engine 5 include:

• High-speed edge enhancement – Anti-aliasing for visually smoother edges on graphic objects, Adobe describes, even at lower resolutions, which is designed to reduce processing times.
• Enhanced Unicode support – Control parameters, file paths and passwords now include multi-byte characters from non-Roman character sets for increased ease-of-use in languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
• PDF 2.0 print feature support – Black Point Compensation (BPC) designed to preserve details in image shadow areas during colour conversions; CxF-defined spot colours (Color eXchange Format) to enable spectral-based colour management; HTO (Half-Tone Origin) to align pre-imposed objects to the device pixel-grid.
• Page-level output intent – Colour conversions for multi-page PDF 2.0 jobs can be managed on a page-by-page basis for greater flexibility and automation in prepress workflows.

Agfa Graphics says its Apogee 11 prepress solution will be the first product to incorporate Adobe PDF Print Engine 5. “When Adobe launched the PDF format in 1993, Agfa immediately recognized that its robust imaging model was well-suited for the graphic arts and developed our PDF-based prepress workflow, an industry first. Print has changed dramatically over the last 25 years, but the new releases of Apogee and Adobe PDF Print Engine reaffirm the value and power of PDF for predictable reproduction of complex graphics,” said Erik Peeters, marketing manager, Agfa Graphics.