New Orleans, LA – Newspaper Association of America Exhibition, Booth 4205 – June 16, 2001 FileFlow, Inc. – developer of the Internet's FastSend™ digital courier service – has announced a breakthrough in the transmission and distribution of Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files. FastSend is the file transmission technology that greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to send large graphic files over the Internet. Regardless of the client's Internet connection speed or file size, FastSend can transmit files up to 25 times faster than regular FTP or email. To accomplish this, FastSend compresses image data using a proprietary algorithm called Extended Sub-Band Coding (XSC™). Yielding average ratios of 25 to 30:1, XSC compresses image files with no visual loss in image quality. Applying this technology to PDF documents produces better compression results than the JPEG options used within Adobe Acrobat but with much higher levels of image quality. In addition, images within the PDF files do not exhibit the normal artifacts introduced by JPEG compression. The result is a larger PDF file with more image data that transmits faster than a PDF with high JPEG compression and poor image quality. This means FastSend users who employ PDF in their remote workflows don't have to compromise image quality in order to efficiently send their files from one location to another. It also means that one PDF document with all the original image data can be re-purposed for high - and low - resolution output; something that's impossible to do if too much JPEG compression has been applied during the document's creation. "This is the breakthrough people have waited for," said Nils-Johan Pedersen, FileFlow's President and CEO. "The introduction of PDF and its ability to flatten files for portability was a very important development in our industry. However, until now many PDF files were still too big to transmit because ultra-high quality was necessary and JPEG compression was substandard. FastSend solves this dilemma by providing high-speed transmission of high-quality PDF documents regardless of bandwidth or file size."