Strasbourg - Caldera Graphics, the French software editor leader in large format imaging and production workflow has just launched its new V8 software version optimized for X-Rite iPrism and the Adobe PDF Print Engine

The new Version 8.0 includes:

Adobe PDF Print Engine

The Adobe PDF Print Engine option enables integrated, end-to-end PDF workflows for printing graphically rich content, including variable content for personalized publishing.   The Caldera print solutions powered by Adobe PDF Print Engine allow PDF files to be rendered natively, without conversion to PostScript, helping to ensure that complex designs and transparency effects.

i1prism

i1Prism, the new X-Rite Color Management engine, contains a new ICC Profile generator that enhances Color separation and Color matching in the Caldera print workflow.  With this option, users will benefit from the last state-of-the-art algorithms to print colors that were not reachable with previous profilers with a higher accuracy than before.  Smoother and larger gamuts will provide an extended and better color matching. The deep collaboration between X-Rite and Caldera developers has allowed a complete adequation between the needs of Caldera end-users and the power of i1Prism.  The new version of Easymedia will bring end-users an incredible color experience.

EasyMedia improvements

EasyMedia (Caldera's profile creating software) has 2 new tools for evaluating the quality of a profile and comparing profiles. The Gamut Viewer is a 2D view of the gamut of a profile in the "ab" subspace (of Lab), with a slider for modifying L in real-time. The gamut viewer can also display measurement data (LAB values measured on the ICC target) as single isolated points. This is an interesting feature allowing one to check if the profile has missed some colors.  The Color Analyzer tool displays statistics about how the profile renders different colors, each grouped into different (predefined) color sets. For each set, you can visualize the average LAB deltaE, meaning the expected color difference and the percentage of in-gamut colors. For example, there is a "Pantone set" containing all Pantone solid coated colors, so one can immediately know how many Pantone colors are in-gamut.

Optimized Image Tabs

The Caldera Image Bar now manages multiple "Tabs", allowing one to organize his work much more efficiently.  The Image Bar Tabs are folders containing a certain number of images, either opened in Fileman, created with Compose, Tiling+, etc... It is possible to create new tabs, rename tabs, delete tabs, etc... But also to move/copy files very quickly from one tab to another by simple drag'n'drop or by using the corresponding entries in the menu.

UTF-8 and supported Languages

Caldera is now full UTF-8. This means that the standard universal encoding (already used on Windows and Mac) is now implemented in place of the obsolete ISO-8859 system (or KOI-R in the case of Russian). This will solve problems of accentuated characters in file names, which are usually displayed as strange hieroglyphs in Caldera. This will also permit Caldera to support any language in the future, including multi-byte ones (Chinese, Korean, Japanese).

Automatic printer detection

This feature allows the printer drivers to broadcast over the network (or parse the USB ports in the case of an USB printer) to automatically find the IP address and port number of the printer. All newly installed drivers will have, by default; the "Auto-Connect" flag set.