The site for prepress & print devotees

Prepressure covers design techniques, PDF, PostScript, fonts, JDF and numerous other prepress topics that have to do with printed communication and graphic arts. This site teams up with B4Print.com, the favorite stake-out of many prepress professionals who regularly visit its forums or the front page which offers the latest news on design, prepress and printing.

The poll: Is Adobe Acrobat crash-prone?

I have always been pretty happy with Acrobat 7 Professional. After upgrading to version 8, I quickly found out that this release was less stable and would crash frequently, at least on my systems. Initially Acrobat 9 looked promising but meanwhile I have the impression that it is also less reliable than version 7. I don’t understand why this is the case. Photoshop has always been rock-solid on any system it ran on. InDesign is pretty good as well. Why is Acrobat, which is essentially an elaborate document browser, less reliable than these complex editing apps? Weird!

What is your experience with the various releases of Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Professional? Cast your vote in the poll to the right and discuss your experiences in this thread on the B4print forum.

White space – to the extreme

In page layout, white space refers to the blank area between characters or graphic regions. Last week I saw a magazine that made extreme use of this concept. In my copy a signature that was only printed on one side got through and was used in finishing. In the first part of the magazine there was a set of blank pages and obviously near the end, the same happened again.

It is not unusual to see printed matter with registration issues, a low-res image or some problem with fonts. It is however the first time ever that I saw unprinted pages in a magazine. Maybe ‘NaturFoto’ were trying to improve their carbon footprint?

Ereaders? No thanks, not yet!

The past few months I have been investigating ebook readers. I need a replacement for my 5 year old Palm T3, on which I’ve read hundreds on books. Unfortunately these devices aren’t exactly cheap and none of them can convince me to spend my money. Check my rant about ‘5 reasons not to buy an ereader – yet‘.

Fortunately new devices seem to show up every week. I have yet to try the Sony PRS-600 pictured above and obviously the Apple iPad is also something to look out for.

PrepressPete is tweeting

Wisdom from the PrintPlanet forums: A consultant is really just a dealer with a laid back approach.

What’s new?

New or reworked pages on QR codes, color in PDF files, Het huis van Alijn, the 2010 archive, DIN A7, 2009, using Windows 7 in prepress, Windows 7 typefaces, the A6 paper size, the names of glyphs, Windows 7 font handling, Snow Leopard font management, finishing, prepress, Bifur, the historische drukkerij, and various dictionary terms.

Also have a look at

- B4Print – the prepress forum for people willing to go off-topic once in a while.
- Prepress Pilgrim – DJ’s ramblings on prepress, the web and whatever itches him.
- InDesignSecrets – The podcasts are even better than the site.
- Publicious – Interesting blog about publishing & XML.

Older comments can be found here.