Just when you’ve all cozied down with PDF 1.7 what happens? Yes, that’s right. A new standard rears its head.
Around the middle of 2017 the ISO committee will publish PDF 2.0 (ISO 32000-2). So by the end of 2017 you’ll probably need to be considering how to ensure that your workflow can handle PDF 2.0 files correctly.
As the primary UK expert to this committee I thought I’d give you a heads up now on what to expect. And over the coming months via this blog and our newsletter I’ll endeavor to keep you posted on what to look out for as far as print is concerned. Because, of course, there are many aspects to the standard that do not concern print at all. For instance there are lots of changes in areas such as structure tagging for accessibility and digital signatures that might be important for business and consumer applications.
As you probably already know, in 2008 Adobe handed over ownership and development of the PDF standard to the International Standards Organization. Since that time I’ve been working alongside other experts to ensure that standards have real-world applicability.
And here’s one example relating to color.
The printing condition for which a job was created can be encapsulated in professional print production jobs by specifying an “output intent” in the PDF file. The output intent structure was invented for the PDF/X standards, at first in support of pre-flight, and later to enable color management at the print site to match that used in proofing at the design stage.
But the PDF/X standards only allow a single output intent to be specified for all pages in a job.
PDF 2.0 allows separate output intents to be included for every page individually. The goal is to support jobs where different media are used for various pages, e.g. for the first sheet for each recipient of a transactional print job, or for the cover of a saddle-stitched book. The output intents in PDF 2.0 are an extension of those described in PDF/X, and the support for multiple output intents will probably be adopted back into PDF/X-6 and into the next PDF/VT standard.
But of course, like many improvements, this one does demand a little bit of care. A PDF 1.7 or existing PDF/X reader will ignore the new page level output intents and could therefore produce the wrong colors for a job that contains them.
In my next post I’ll be covering changes around live transparency in PDF 2.0. Bet you can’t wait!
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The background
The last few years have been pretty stable for PDF; PDF 1.7 was published in 2006, and the first ISO PDF standard (ISO 32000-1), published in 2010, was very similar to PDF 1.7. In the same way, PDF/X 4 and PDF/X 5, the most recent PDF/X standards, were both published in 2010, six years ago.
In the middle of 2017 ISO 32000-2 will be published, defining PDF 2.0. Much of the new work in this version is related to tagging for content re-use and accessibility, but there are also several areas that affect print production. Among them are some changes to the rendering of PDF transparency, ways to include additional data about spot colors and about how color management should be applied.
Interesting read, I am looking forward to the follow-up posts. You mention that Adobe handed over ownership of the PDF standard to ISO in 2010. Most articles about this transfer (such as this one: https://www.wired.com/2008/01/adobe_s_pdf_file_format_receives_iso_blessing/) claim that happened in 2008. It means it took ISO a mere 9 years to come up with a new version of PDF. They are certainly taking their time!
Hi Laurens. Thanks for the correction; for some reason I keep making that mistake! Yes, it’s taken a while, especially as 32000-1 was supposed to be technically identical to PDF 1.7 (it’s not quite), which means we need to look back to 2006!