Agfa Apogee first product to incorporate APPE 5

Agfa’s Apogee 11 prepress solution will be the first product to incorporate the newly released Adobe PDF Print Engine 5 (APPE 5), developed to maximise colour impact in digital printers with inksets beyond CMYK.

Adobe said that with ongoing innovations in ink and inkjet heads creating opportunities to print on new surfaces, and designers thus pushing the creative envelope with Adobe Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC, graphically rich jobs are becoming increasingly complex to print. PDF Print Engine 5 is optimised to precisely render these graphically rich jobs for printing on flat and contoured surfaces including paper, plastic, fabric, metal, ceramic, glass, and food products. New in PDF Print Engine 5 are: - High-speed edge enhancement - anti-aliasing for visually smoother edges on graphic objects, even at lower resolutions. - 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 colour conversions; CxF-defined spot colours (Colour eXchange Format) to enable spectral-based colour management; HTO (Half-Tone Origin) to align pre-imposed objects to the device pixel-grid. - Page-level output intent - colour 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 colour imaging and predictable results every step of the way.” Erik Peeters, marketing manager, Agfa Graphics, added. “When Adobe launched the PDF format in 1993, Agfa immediately recognised 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.” PDF Print Engine 5 is now available to solution partners working to integrate it into their product lines. PSPs will be able to buy, or upgrade to, products built on PDF Print Engine 5 g later in the year.