Acrobat 4 and PDF files

In the past decade or so, there has been an unprecedented technological revolution in the printing industry. Everything now is unthinkable in 1985. In recent years, PDF has quietly appeared in our work, but it has not been able to play a protagonist. However, with the release of Acrobat 4, especially its color improvement, we have to seriously review the PDF again. PDF files were not originally designed for professional printing. However, since Acrobat 3 in 1996, it has made great progress in this area, but it has only met the need to produce monochromatic prints. To use it in a color reproduction workflow, there are many areas for improvement, such as the output of spot colors and Duotone patterns. PDF is a platform-independent format that allows people to easily exchange digital files between different computers. The main convenience it brings to us is that we can use the free Acrobat Reader to read and print them. In the PDF file, images are embedded (except OPI). PDF files also use a variety of compression schemes, such as the CCITT Group 4 and so on. We may not be familiar with these compression schemes, but they will automatically work for us. Adobe originally designed PDF files with four intents: one for the transmission on the Web, the second for distribution on CDs, and the third for inkjet printers, laser printers, etc. The fourth is for traditional methods of printing or digital printing. (eg Xeikon DCP-1, Agfa Chromapress, Indigo ePrint, etc.) Of course, PDF files for different purposes need to be optimized in different ways. For example, PDF files used for printing are much more complex than PDF files used for browsing the web. Editing PDF files is not easy because its programming language is quite complex. However, Acrobat Exchange provides a "trimming tool" whose functions include entering characters and adjusting the font size. In addition to editing text, we usually also need to edit the images in the PDF file. Today, Enfocus's PitStop provides more comprehensive editing capabilities. PitStop is an Acrobat Exchange plug-in for Mac and Windows 95/98/NT. The latest version is 4, which provides more functions for processing text, adjusting colors, and moving objects within a page. It also allows users to use words in computer systems that may not be embedded in PDF files, and allows them to copy objects from one PDF file to another. Acrobat also supports deleting, reordering, cropping, and replacing pages. PDF files can also be split and flattened. Double-click the picture, depending on the type of picture, you can start Photoshop or Illustrator. After the picture was modified in both softwares, the picture in the PDF file also changed. In addition, you can extract a full page from the PDF file, edit it into Illustrator, and then put it back into the original PDF file. EnFocus PitStop 4 can also completely modify images or other elements in PDF files. Other developers have also created some Acrobat Exchange plug-ins that greatly expand the capabilities of Acrobat Exchange. Lantana Research's Crackerjack is able to create color separations for PDF files and supports register lines and cut line functions. Quite Software's A Bag of Tricks can convert spot colors into four colors and convert all text elements to black as needed. It also supports the use of ICC profiles in the conversion process of RGB-CMYK, and can repair some PDF files that have gone wrong during Distiller processing. Acrobat 4 is actually a small packaged software. Its core software is also called Acrobat (the original Acrobat Exchange), and its functions include printing files on multiple devices, storing files in PDF or Postscript format, and making simple edits to PDF files. Then introduce the other software in the package software and its basic functions Acrobat Distiller can use any one or two steps to make any Postscript file (such as Postscript file obtained by QuarkXPress, PageMaker or other typesetting software) into a PDF file; Acrobat Capture can work with scanners to implement OCR recognition and store the resulting text as a PDF file; PDFWriter can convert simple documents (such as text documents or spreadsheets) into PDF files in just one or two steps ; Acrobat Web Capture (currently available only for Windows) can download HTML files and convert them (along with all their linked content) into PDF files; PDFMaker (currently only Windows version) can directly send Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Documents are converted into PDF files; free Acrobat Reader can read and print any PDF file. The newly released Acrobat 4 and PDF v1.3 greatly enhance the overall capabilities of PDF files in print output and other output, support for TrueType characters, color processing/output, text and image editing, and fonts in Asian countries. Better yet, its "dressing tools" have also been greatly improved, and support for bleeding and cutting lines (although Acrobat 4 itself does not provide these functions, it can be implemented with the help of plug-ins). The maximum page size has been expanded to 200 x 200 inches. PDF 1.2 is based on Postscript 2 and PDF 1.3 is based on Postscript 3. Postscript 3 supports 1024 gray levels (postscript 2 only supports 256 gray levels), and Postscript 3 RIP also supports trapping. PDF files are extremely fast on Postscript 3 RIP and are also compatible with Postscript 1 and Postscript 2.