Adobe has announced version 5 of Adobe PDF Print Engine. The new version extends PDF Print Engine’s reliable color reproduction with new capabilities to harness the full potential of today’s digital and conventional presses. Ongoing innovations in ink and inkjet heads are creating opportunities to print on new surfaces, and PDF Print Engine 5 will maximize color impact in the coming generation of textile presses, industrial print stations, and digital presses for label and packaging production.

Designers continue to push the creative envelope with the latest functionality in Adobe Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC, resulting in graphically rich jobs that are increasingly complex to print. PDF Print Engine 5 is optimized to precisely render these graphically rich jobs for printing on flat and contoured surfaces including paper, plastic, fabric, metal, ceramic, glass, and food products. The new color features in PDF Print Engine 5 strengthen support for Expanded Color Gamut (ECG) digital presses with ink-sets that go beyond the 4-color base of cyan, magenta, yellow and black to magnify the visual and tactile effect of brand messaging.
 

What’s New in Adobe PDF Print Engine 5:

? High-speed edge enhancement – Anti-aliasing for visually smoother edges on graphic objects, even at lower resolutions, reduces processing times to a fraction of the time compared to alternative and post-rendering methods. 
? Enhanced Unicode support – Control parameters, file paths and passwords now include multi-byte characters from non-Roman character sets, which increases ease-of-use in languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
? PDF 2.0 print feature support – Black Point Compensation (BPC) to preserve details in image shadow areas during color conversions; CxF-defined spot colors (Color eXchange Format) to enable spectral-based color management; HTO (Half-Tone Origin) to align pre-imposed objects to the device pixel-grid, ensuring identical line-screens.
? Page-level output intent – Color conversions for multi-page PDF 2.0 jobs can be managed on a page-by-page basis, enabling greater flexibility and automation in prepress workflows.
 

“Brand managers count on accurate reproduction of vibrant designs to connect with customers,” said Adil Munshi, vice president and general manager, Print and Publishing Business Unit, Adobe. “Print jobs that are authored in Adobe Creative Cloud, reviewed in Adobe Acrobat DC, and proofed and output by Adobe PDF Print Engine 5 will now deliver the fastest rendering, best-of-breed color imaging and predictable results every step of the way.”
 

“Agfa Graphics is excited to announce that Apogee 11, our leading prepress solution, will be the first product to incorporate Adobe PDF Print Engine 5,” said Erik Peeters, marketing manager, Agfa Graphics. “When Adobe launched the PDF format in 1993, Agfa immediately recognized that its robust imaging model was well-suited for the graphic arts and developed our PDF-based prepress workflow, an industry first. Print has changed dramatically over the last 25 years, but the new releases of Apogee and Adobe PDF Print Engine reaffirm the value and power of PDF for predictable reproduction of complex graphics.”
 

Availability

PDF Print Engine 5 is available to new and long-standing solution partners, who are now working to integrate it into their product lines.
 

Adobe collaborates closely with market-leading vendors to bring the Adobe PDF print experience to every segment: commercial printing, publishing, signage, CAD/GIS, photography, packaging/labels, direct mail, textile/garments and other manufacturing applications. When deployed in the Mercury RIP Architecture on multi-core, networked or cloud platforms, PDF Print Engine 5 can be scaled to drive high-volume production on a single press, and across multiple presses.
 

Print Service Providers can buy, or upgrade to, products built on PDF Print Engine 5 starting later this year.