The heart of any digital production workflow is the DFE (Digital Front End). It is the technology that processes and rasterizes the file for imaging. DFEs have been around long before digital presses; in fact, they are what drove filmsetters and still drive platesetters. At the heart of the DFE is an interpreter that processes the images, fonts, color, and other embedded file information and then rasterizes it for imaging on the output device. While the older interpreter technology at the core of the DFE was based on PostScript, the newer DFEs are all based on PDF rendering technology.

There are many companies that have developed technology for interpreting PDF files. However, there are two primary OEM providers of that core technology used for DFEs: Adobe APPE and Global Graphics Harlequin Host Renderer. We covered the most recent Harlequin technology in an earlier article. Of course, Adobe has a much larger overall footprint and visibility since it also develops and licenses their Creative Suite applications, which are the most widely used design tools on the market. However, Global Graphics’ Harlequin Host Renderer can increasingly be found in many DFEs. Regardless of which rendering engine is at the core of a DFE, as technology changes, and the introduction of digital packaging production and bespoke print manufacturing continues to grow, the requirements of the DFE are changing.

PDF 2.0, which is the first new version of PDF since 2008, was designed to address many of those new requirements. While not all of the new features in PDF 2.0 impact print production, some of them do and that is what we can see in the new Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE) 5. In my estimation, the two most important features are support for page-level output intents and CxF. Output intents are used in PDF files and more specifically PDF/X files to communicate the desired destination device output the creator is expecting. By including an output intent in the PDF file creation, you can actually simulate a device’s output characteristics or even a standard output intent like GRACoL on different devices, providing there is enough color gamut available. In this new feature upgrade, you are not limited to file-level output intents and can now have individual page-level output intents within a single file. This feature could be helpful if you are aggregating or imposing many PDF/X files into a single document.