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Unit 12: Portable Document Format

Notes
The release of a plug-in to view PDF files in the Netscape browser increased the popularity
of PDF file on the booming Internet. Adobe also added the possibility to link PDF files to
HTML pages and vice versa. PDF also slowly began to get accepted by the graphic arts
industry. Initially the black-and-white digital printing market began using PDF for output
on fast Xerox digital presses.
PDF 1.3 Listening to prepress needs

Acrobat 4, internally known as ‘Stout’ within Adobe, was launched in April 1999. It brought
us PDF 1.3. The new PDF specs included support for:

• 2-byte CID fonts
• OPI 2.0 specifications
• a new color space called DeviceN to improve support for spot colors

• smooth shading, a technology that allows for efficient and very smooth blends (transitions
from one color or tint to another).

• annotations
Acrobat itself also had its fair share of novelties, including:

• support for page sizes up to 5080 x 5080 mm, up from 1143 x 1143 mm
Illustrator 9 and PDF 1.4 Acrobat will have to wait
Mid 2000, Adobe did something weird: they released Illustrator 9. Although launching a
new version of a drawing application is not that bizarre, Illustrator 9 did have one amazing
feature: it was the first application to support PDF 1.4 and its transparency feature. This was
the first time Adobe did not accompany a new version of PDF with a new version of Acrobat.
They also did not release the full specs of PDF 1.4, although technote 5407 documented the
transparency support in PDF 1.4.

PDF 1.5 and Acrobat 6 More choice for already confused users
In April 2003, Adobe announced Acrobat 6 which started shipping late May. The internal
codename for Acrobat 6 was ‘Newport’. As usual, the new version of Acrobat also brought
along a new version of PDF, version 1.5.

PDF 1.5 brings along a number of new features to will probably take a pretty long time before
they get implemented or supported in applications. The new stuff includes.

• Improved compression techniques including object streams and JPEG 2000 compression
• Support for layers

• Improved support for tagged PDF
2005: another year, another PDF revision
In January 2005 Adobe started shipping Acrobat 7 (original code name: Vegas). Of course it
offered support for a new PDF flavor. PDF 1.6 offers the following improvements:
NChannel is an extension of the DeviceN mechanism for defining spot colors in a PDF
document. It is backwards compatible with DeviceN and enables more accurate handling
of color blending by including additional dot gain and color mixing information.
The major new feature is the ability to embed 3D data.
Contd...

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