When will PreScript and PlateMaster go open source so we can start porting them for our iPhones?

Rock on – tc

Hi Michael:
Thanks for the compliments but you should know that I had some unique advantages when I posted to the CtP forum so many years back. As subject matter expert, I was given considerable leeway (tremendous amount actually) by Creo’s upper management to say whatever I wanted to say on the forum. Dave Kauffman, as a manager, had to be considerable more discreet and diplomatic about what he could say.
I DO remember a few posts that I put on the forum which did not go over so well internally and D.K. had to go around and spread some oil over troubled waters. So there is some oweage there.

DJ – keep the post coming – I imagine there are a million wars stories like that one !

It’s good to see you back on the trail, I figured you’d be running for president of the u.s. by now Michael! (It was almost impossible to followup the ever charismatic MJ on stage. Ask him about the pdfophile…)

You are correct about my error – it wasn’t spot colors per se that kept us from shipping Prinergy (Araxi then) until Acrobat 3, it was a thing called Device-N,which was the only way we could conjure the critical-mass combination of composite PDF (so it could be trapped) as well as handling the (in)famous Quark spot-color colorized TIFF!

Thanks for – as always, Mr. Jahn – keeping me on my toes..

It is Roto-Smeets, not Rolo-Smeets (roto as in rotogravure). Currently the company is called RSDB.

Regarding ‘fake’ PDF workflows: since Prinergy used the CPSI for many years and CPSI internally converts PDF to PostScript before rendering it, I assume Prinergy was a ‘faky’ as well

I seem to remember some of that just a little differently !

When I worked at Shea Communications, later aquired by World Color, we were using Acrobat 2.1, with a small set of changes to the file in that Distiller Start-up folder (setDistillerParams). We had several customers creating and sending CMYK PDF files that we RIPed using Scitex VIP in 1998 and sending the CT data to engraving gravure cylinders with our Helio – so, while there was no direct to cylinder workflow, PDF was certainly viable for prepress before 1999.

I think I have a 1997 vintage PDF posted here;

http://michaelejahn.blogspot.com/2008/01/i-stumbled-across-statement-in-forum.html

11 years old and still rips fine !

What was not ready before 1999 was Adobe Extreme.

As Creo wisely decided to wait, Agfa pretended all was well – and using PDF 1.4 (Acrobat 3) and the soon to die PJTF – we faked the whole sha-bang by converting PDF to PostScript, waking it through Preps before we RIPed and called it a PDF workflow – Apogee Series 1.

Related to spot colors, the early adopters of PDF workflows and CTP were Newspapers, Magazines and Catalogs, none who needed spot color support all that much.

Now, where are we – GWG is quickly tightening up PDF/X exchange ‘best practices’ documents.

At the time we were stuck – Postscript coming out of Quark was an incredible mess. They would do things like let a user include a 50MB 300 dpi image and shrink it down to 2 inches square and then send the whole file with the postscript, creating like a 5,000 dpi file. You can imagine what catalogs looked like – 2GB PostScript files of a few pages.

I pitched the development of PreScript on the balance between Scitex’ approach of ripping to CTLW on one hand (old school) and the future of PDF, which at the time (Acrobat 2) couldn’t even do spot colors.

PreScript was a bridging tecnology while we were scrambling with Adobe to make PDF viable for prepress, which didn’t happen until Acrobat 4 coincidentally in 1999 when we launched Prinergy…

http://davekauffman.ca