CHICAGO, Sept. 14 -- HELIOS Software GmbH, a leading network and prepress solutions developer, announced that its new PDF-Native OPI workflow has received PRINT(R) 05's prestigious "Worth-A-Look" award for digital prepress products. Selected from over 7,500 products by a 15-member independent panel of industry analysts, the award honors those products that are most likely to have the greatest impact on the printing industry in the years to come. HELIOS' new technology, debuting at PRINT 05, is a PDF-based OPI image replacement solution that replaces, within a PDF file, the low-res bitmap images with the high-res originals. Native PDF-based OPI image replacement translates into workflow flexibility and faster turnaround times, for a vital competitive advantage. "Modern pre-press applications like Adobe(R) InDesign(R) are moving to a direct PDF output workflow, allowing advanced features like PDF transparency, drop shadows, and embedded XMP metadata," explained Helmut Tschemernjak, president of HELIOS. "Unfortunately, these features are incompatible with today's PostScript output. But now, HELIOS is the first to offer a solution that preserves transparency and metadata to allow server-based PDF workflows utilizing OPI low-res images." Native PDF-based OPI image replacement also offers enormous time savings to make remote page composition productive and practical. Remote users using HELIOS WebShare can download low-res images and return PDF print jobs containing low-res images, which are then replaced on the server for final output. Customers can then remotely and securely verify their InDesign documents and PDF print jobs via any web browser. For more information on HELIOS support for PDF-native OPI, see http://www.helios.de/