3rd Quarter Newsletter

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

3rd Quarter Newsletter

Artifex 3rd Quarter 2012 Newsletter

3rd Quarter Newsletter for 2012 Artifex Business and Financial News
Artifex will be hosting a booth at this year’s Graph Expo Trade Show in the McCormick Convention Center, Chicago, Illinois.

Graph Expo runs from October 7th through October 10th, 2012. Artifex is located at booth number 464. Please stop by and say hello. Artifex will also be hosting a booth at AnDevCom. This show will be held at the Burlingame Hyatt Hotel, San Francisco Airport. AnDevCom runs from December 4th through December 7th, 2012.

Technology News
This is the sixth full release in the stable 9.X series

Ghostscript 9.06
Ghostscript can now publish PDF/A-2b compliant output. PDF/A is a subset of PDF language suitable for archiving and document preservation, the output must be self-contained and all resources should be embedded with no references outside the PDF document. The new PDF/A-2b option allows users to generate output compliant with PDF/A-2b or ISO 19005-2 Level B conformance.

PDF publishers should examine the output options in the Ghostscript documentation and check they are using the PDF format best suited to their workflow requirements.

Another enhancement to PDF and PostScript publishing includes a new server mode. This allows the program to run continuously and not be restarted for each job. This change is very important to customers sensitive to the startup time incurred by Ghostscript initialization or the overhead associated with starting a process; web servers are an important target of this feature. If your workflow would benefit from the new server mode but you are a little fuzzy about how to set it up, please contact us, and we will have an engineer work with you to get this going, it can result in significant performance improvements.

A nice side effect of the new server mode gives Ghostscript the ability to burst (separate into individual pages) PDF files without processing the file for each page. For customers working in high-end print graphics and prepress, we’ve improved handling of files with many separations. Both performance and robustness have improved with files accessing many plates.

Also, we have brought new scaling technology to this arena. The color printing devices (tiff separation and PhotoShop devices) now support downscaling and diffusion dithering in lieu of traditional halftoning. This technology is similar to the what our FAX devices use and was recommended in the Third Quarter 2011 newsletter. Customers should evaluate the quality performance tradeoff in their workflow and choose the best Ghostscript options.

This release includes support for the use of the Output Intent ICC profile that is present in PDF/X source documents. This allows proper soft proofing, hard proofing and separation creation based upon the defined intent of the document creator. The use of -dUsePDFX3Profile will ensure compliance for the test files published by the Ghent PDF Workgroup.
Finally, for printer customers, we have a new feature which allows choosing where to store the command list in a file or memory. The latter option may convey some time improvements over the former at the expense of more memory usage, as usual customers should evaluate the different options in their workflow.

MuPDF release 1.1
This release is a bugfix and stability release with one notable new feature: MuPDF can now produce linearized PDF. Converting PDF’s to linearized is very useful in applications that must provide fast access to pages in a slow transmission environment (over a network).

We plan an interim MuPDF release in the October time frame, normally we only release twice a year in February and August.

The release will have Alpha level support for PDF Interactive Forms. We’d like to get this source code only release in the hands of early adopters as soon as it is available.

Thanks to all of you for this opportunity to communicate with you. I feel that this is a convenient and important medium to make our OEM customers and potential customers aware of new and significant changes within our growing company! As always, and we mean this sincerely, your questions or comments are always welcome.