Introducing PDF To CIP3's Format

BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO

Many of the prepress and press manufacturers within the CIP3 consortium are Adobe OEM customers and, as such, rely heavily on Adobe to share its vision on emerging digital workflows with the CIP3 membership, as well as to participate actively within the consortium to make sure that the strategies and technologies defined by CIP3 are supportive of industry trends. At present, all eyes are on Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and its impact on the direction of CIP3's Print Production Format (PPF).

Over the past two years, Adobe—the founding force behind the industry's migration to Portable Document Format (PDF) compatibility—led the effort within the technical committee of CIP3 to reconcile the goals of an industry standard for production data with the growing importance of PDF and the Portable Job Ticket Format (PJTF).

PPF Fast Fact The Print Production Format is the specification developed by CIP3 that defines how an organization passes production data from prepress to press to postpress. Currently, version 3.0 of the PPF is based on Adobe's PostScript language. PDF Fast Fact PDF captures all page content in a reliable way, but does not include information on page production or content control. This is where the PJTF comes along, storing all technical information on page production. PJTF Fast Fact Adobe's PJTF is the production job ticket format based on PDF. Following a thorough technical analysis, the CIP3 general meeting recently approved a new PJTF encoding for the CIP3 PPF format. Extreme Fast Fact Adobe PostScript Extreme incorporates advanced prepress capabilities, using PDF and PJTF, to automate prepress processes including imposition, trapping and preflighting, as well as providing multi-RIP support for high-speed engines. Adobe sees the possibility for future Extreme integration with the CIP3 PPF initiative.

PDF is very familiar to anyone who knows anyone who works in prepress. Adobe's PJTF is the production job ticket format based on PDF. It is used in Adobe Post-Script Extreme and will be the mechanism by which automated digital production becomes a reality.