THE PERFECT FILE FORMAT

Aug 1, 1997 12:00 PM, Elias Crim

It's safe to say almost nobody noticed anything unusual about last March's tri-fold cover of the Ladies Home Journal, which looked exactly as it was supposed to look.

And that's the whole point, since the only thing different about the cover was its production--it came from a 100 percent filmless digital workflow.

Participants in the Digital Ad Lab, a multi-industry task force devoted to developing case studies of digital ad production, were insiders to the cover project, however. Meredith Corp., publisher of the magazine, participated in this first phase of pilot projects aimed at demonstrating the virtues of an all-digital ad production and publication workflow--in this case, from digital files through direct-to-plate.

"Meredith received the digital ads--a total of six in this issue alone--via its WAM!NET link to Wace USA's San Francisco prepress operations," states Mary Bukowski, a digital ad specialist with R.R. Donnelley's Technology Center in Lisle, IL. The idea for this workflow case study, one of four, was to demonstrate how a single page digital ad can be supplied to multiple publications.

Other case studies, recently concluded, involved sending a single-page ad to multiple printing devices, a single page ad sent to multiple print vendors, and a partial page ad sent through all three of the latter processes. The Digital Ad Lab presented all these case studies to a 200-person audience at Seybold New York in April and will present a progress report at Print '97 this September in Chicago.

"The WAM!NET delivery from San Francisco to Elgin, IL was in the 12 MB per minute range," Bukowski notes. A total of approximately 750 MB of data were required for the entire case study with Meredith's advertisers, with no problems of file integrity from the transmission method.

The files were transmitted in the raster data format known as TIFF/IT-P1 (the P1 subset targets the needs of the desktop community), after converting from Scitex native format. This aspect of the project was a significant one, as it represented further confirmation that the TIFF/IT standard, one subs cribed to by a growing population within the advertising industry in this country, is beginning to have a real-world impact.

Ask Alan Darling, whose print shop, Western Laser Graphics (Valencia, CA), just produced an entire 100-page, four-color magazine with a completely digital workflow based on TIFF/IT-formatted files. Darling is COO of the company and an active member of the Digital Distribution of Advertising for Publications (DDAP) Assn. (Vista, CA).

The latter group--largely major advertising agencies, publishers and printers--has been influential in moving this standard (also known as ANSI IT8.8 and ISO 12639) toward wider adoption. (To download a free copy of the DDAP's TIFF/ IT-P1 Photoshop Plug-in, go to http:// www.tool.net/friends/ jahn/tiff-it//.)

The DDAP's recent 1997 Conference in Chicago highlighted these and numerous related issues, as well as the results of the Digital Ad Lab's pilot projects such as the Meredith case study.

With the DDAP membership and the advertising industry generally, we are looking at a largely CEPS (Color Electronic Prepress Systems) universe--the "high-end" equipment of Crosfield, Screen, Linotype-Hell and Scitex. In fact, ad industry estimates are that around 80 percent of ad materials still pass through CEPS (as opposed to PostScript-based desktop systems) for at least the final assembly and output to film. Unfortunately for advocates of an integrated workflow, CEPS systems cannot "talk" directly to each other without a certain amount of time and labor spent in converting files.

TIFF/IT-P1 is designed to overcome this obstacle, as it relates to raster data exchange specifically. The standard is seen as an important "enabler," as techies might say, of digital printing generally.

One industry leader is Harlequin (Cambridge, MA), whose Andy Masia says the company is close to offering direct-to-RIP recording of TIFF/IT files in its imaging systems.

And what about the other universe, that of good old desktop and PostScript-based (or mixed vector/raster) data? The data exchange situation is not exactly smooth sailing here, either. "That's because not all PostScript files are created equal," quips Darling. Many of them, he points out, contain lots of redundant data and arrive at prepress departments with a wide range of quality and efficiency in output.

Enter the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Ambitious describes Adobe's aims with its PDF strategy. A major goal, already reached in the Acrobat product, is to allow users to view and manage documents in both an application- and platform-independent manner. Some industry experts share the view of Frank Romano, professor of graphic arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, that PDF also will allow TIFF/IT protocols to be integrated within PDF. At any step of the direct-to process--to film, plate, printer, press or Web page--users will enjoy new levels of editability and production efficiency. We'll have "one format--portable, intelligent, repurposable," as Romano recently characterized PDF.

Harlequin's Andy Masia is enthused about the idea that the PDF's editing capability might mean that high-end copydot scans could at last be eliminated. Instead, digital files could be edited for different versions of an ad and for different presses' line screen rulings. "Having to create different sets of film for so many different kinds of output is a wasteful process," the Harlequin executive comments.

R.R. Donnelley's Bob Schaffel adds that PDFs are just now becoming production tools. Schaffel, a manager of emerging technology with Donnelley, says he's confident that Adobe's new production system architecture will keep going in the right direction, however.

Darling quotes "Darling's first rule for new technology": it must work with both desktop- and CEPS-based workflows. "That's because these two file formats--PDF and TIFF/IT--are absolutely complementary and converging quickly," he states.

Nor is Darling afraid of playing the technology visionary. "If we in the graphic arts business spend too much time worrying about today's tools and not enough about growing the pie for printing," he concludes, "we'll risk becoming the typographers of the '90s."

Okay, so the big ad agencies are gradually weaning themselves away from supplying film as they discover the benefits of providing digital ads in the TIFF/IT file format. Doesn't that just mean we're still stuck with two separate--and expensive--workflows, one PostScript-based and the other TIFF/IT-based?

Yes, for the moment. But help is already on the way.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) develops standards for the entire spectrum of industries, including the graphic arts. Within ANSI's Committee for Graphic Arts Technologies Standards is Subcommittee 6, tasked with drafting a new set of standards in the area of file formats. Many of the key players in the industry are represented in this effort, including Adobe and other prominent names in the prepress technology arena.

One highly informed member of that committee is David Q. McDowell, senior technical associate with Eastman Kodak (Rochester, NY). McDowell agrees that a more integrated digital future is on the near horizon. His graphical depiction of CGATS .12 (as it is called) appears in the illustration.

"We've needed a file format that lies between the proprietary formats of the application packages and the PostScript code that they create to drive output devices. This intermediate format must be exportable and importable by a wide variety of applications so that work can be completed progressively--i.e., you can edit data coming from a different application or even a different platform from the one you're on," McDowell explains.

"Such a format would do for object-oriented and vector data (i.e., PostScript) what the TIFF/IT format now does for CT, LW and HC data used by the raster-based CEPS systems."

And what's the strongest candidate for this intermediate data-exchange format? The answer would seem to be Adobe's Portable Document Format, or PDF, the only such format that has a publically available specification.

"The graphic simply shows how our mixed universe of PDF (object-oriented or vector/raster) data and TIFF/IT (purely raster) data can interoperate for data exchange," McDowell observes. "A PDF file (PDF1 in the illustration) would typically contain text as character strings (along with the font data for rendering), line art as stroked or filled vector data, and CT picture data. The latter is raster data that is common to both PDF and TIFF/IT-CT and can move easily between the two file structures. The rest of the object-oriented data can be RIPed to the LW and HC files used routinely today within CEPS systems. The key decision is when to move this vector data to raster."

McDowell explains that when this conversion is entirely complete and proofed prior to final assembly, it eliminates the potential for missing elements stalling the RIPing process or the risk of any variation between different PostScript interpreters. Ultimately, this new standard will mean that the user decides precisely when in the production process--before or at final output--to rasterize the data, he notes.

Note that a second PDF file (PDF2 in the illustration) can be used as a wrapper on the newly created family of TIFF/IT files, which are linked by an FP (final-page) file. Alternatively, this second PDF file can be created from both TIFF/IT and/or PDF inputs to create a larger printing element for another level of data exchange.

When the implementation of the new CGATS .12 standard delivers this kind of interoperability, McDowell concludes, it will bring us much closer to the goal of an all-digital graphic arts workflow using accredited standards.