Enfocus Software, an Esko Artwork company, announced that its PitStop Server 10 will feature automated transparency flattening.
While this may not seem like big news to a lot of folks, to print shops that rely on PostScript or PDF 1.3 RIPs will find this to be a welcome addition. Customers who use Adobe Creative Suite applications and QuarkXPress can produce PDFs with transparent content. Drop shadows, for instance, are used by a lot of designers and are transparent objects. These become problems when the prepress departments try to RIP these PDFs when they don't have a RIP that can flatten transparency.
Transparency flattening in these workflows then falls to the designer or to the prepress department before the file gets to the RIP. Acrobat is frequently used to flatten transparent PDFs, as is InDesign. Alternatively, shops demand PDF/X-1a files, since PDF/X-1a doesn't allow transparency and will force the creating application to flatten the transparency when the PDF gets created.
Having the ability to flatten transparency in a PitStop Server workflow removes this manual step in the workflow, and allows shops to fully automate preflight, transparency flattening, and correction of PDFs.
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