Prepress Technology March 2000
Software players look
to new media delivery
By Lisa Larson
Prepress Editor
BOSTON -- The buzz at Seybold Boston 2000 centered on technologies and products designed to enable the repurposing of content for cross-media publishing.
At a joint keynote on the future of publishing with industry heavyweights Bruce Chizen and John Warnock from Adobe Systems Inc., Tim Gill from Quark Inc., and David Mendels, who filled in for Macromedia Inc.'s president, Norm Meyrowitz, much of the discussion centered on the direction the industry is going in terms of content delivery, and ways the companies plan to help publishers make it all possible.
Each of the companies introduced new products designed to make publishing to the Internet and Web-enabled devices easier, less cost prohibitive and integrated more seamlessly into the workflow.
Quark explored XML, its role in the future of publishing, and announced plans to offer full XML support in its suite of tools. This includes QuarkXPress 5.0, which is expected to ship during the fourth quarter.
XPress 5.0 is designed to give publishers the ability to publish to multiple media easily, and offers sophisticated print functions, said Quark. The company's recently released Digital Media System also supports XML input and output. (See related story pg. 36).
The next release of XPress will Web-enable Quark's existing customer base with design and layout tools for both print and Web media. The company emphasized the importance of making it possible for publishers to publish content to a new medium without having it be as costly as it was to produce the print version.
There won't be a new product introduced for print that will cut production costs even 10 percent, said Gill during the keynote, and because venture capital financing requires growth, that is why print isn't getting any VC funding.
Macromedia unveiled its FreeHand 9 design and layout software for cross-media publishing, which the company expects to ship on both Macintosh and Windows platforms this month.
FreeHand 9 can save to Flash file format, enabling FreeHand 9 vector-based files to be printed from Web browsers. In addition to Flash integration, FreeHand 9 includes a release-to-layers feature which creates animations, integrated HTML publishing with URLs, embedded Flash files and Dreamweaver files, and includes a symbol library that allows designers to use master elements across multiple pages and designs.
The new Perspective Grid feature represents three-dimensional media in a two-dimensional drawing environment. A live enveloping tool allows users to wrap and distort graphics in real-time. A new integrated autotrace feature allows publishers to convert bitmap graphics to vector objects, and the magic wand tool enables automatic tracing of unique sections within an illustration.
Additional creative features include new color management options, blending enhancements, typographic controls, interactive transformations and greater drawing control and precision.
New productivity enhancements include an intuitive visual page management environment for easier layout control of multi-page documents, a fully customizable user interface, and a new vector lasso tool to quickly select areas or objects within an illustration. Additional design benefits include the Flash anti-aliased preview within FreeHand, which allows users to view their Flash content without launching a Web browser.
Previous owners of FreeHand or Flash can upgrade to the Flash 4 FreeHand 9 Studio for $199. Registered FreeHand users can upgrade to the new version for $149. The studio is priced at $499 and FreeHand alone costs $399. Competitive upgrades to FreeHand are available for $169.
Adobe introduced Acrobat InProduction, announced that PDF Merchant is shipping, and showcased its recently released InCopy and InDesign copy edit and page layout products.
InProduction, which won a Seybold Hot Pick award, manages PDF files through a print production workflow. InProduction consists of five integrated tools for preflighting, handling color separation and conversion, specifying trim and bleed settings, and defining trapping parameters in PDF files.
The preflight tool identifies and corrects errors, such as improper font embedding, before a job is sent to production. Users can create, edit, share and reuse profiles. The preflight tool is also available online. By using a predefined or custom developed profile, users can submit files up to 10 megabytes for preflight analysis.
The separator tool specifies, previews and creates color separations, maps spot colors to process colors and spot or custom colors to specific plates. This tool displays on-screen previews of the color separations, including views of plate overlays and overprint, eliminating the need to print separations for preview.
The trim/bleed tool is designed to provide precise control for defining imageable areas, as well as specifying or changing the media, bleed, trim or art boxes. The ability to specify art boxes is a requirement for the new PDF/X-1 standard.
The color converter works in batch or single-file mode to convert LAB, RGB or CMYK to CMYK using industry-standard ICC profiles, and allows for the tagging or untagging of ICC profiles within a PDF file.
Adobe in-RIP trapping allows users to specify page and regional zone-based trapping parameters for later output to a PostScript 3 RIP.
Adobe Acrobat InProduction is expected to ship in North America and Europe this spring with an estimated retail price of about $900.
Quark
800.676.4575
www.quark.com
Macromedia
800.457.1774
www.macromedia.com
Adobe
800.8336687
www.adobe.com