Full bleed for commercial printing

Henrik has it ever occurred to you that you may be explaining it badly?

Ignoring the fact that it should not be necessary to understand the internal workings of an internal combustion engine to drive a well designed modern car.

If you can not figure out how to get the car out of the driveway (because it is so fiendishly difficult) it is not your fault, but that of the automotive designer's.

The automotive designer who creates a city runabout that requires a Formula 1 mechanic's training to drive to the shops, should have their head severely slapped with a week old fish.

The automotive designer who creates a city runabout that requires a Formula 1 mechanic's training to drive to the shops, should have their head severely slapped with a week old fish.

I can understand that you want to vent your frustration, but you should vent your frustation on the people who are supposed to support this in documentation.

The fact is that there is a filter for PDF/X-3. If you want to save out a printing master in ways other than through that filter, then there is no control of any kind that the master is printable.

I'm sorry.

/hh

I am not venting my frustration, it was a cool observation on an unfortunate modern phenomena:

High Tech Bad Design (HTBD).

Thinking that just because something has advanced features and/or technology that is enough, it doesn't require any deep considered thought to put it "out there".

Especially when it it is half baked, but marketed as +*The Answer!*+

btw When I print to PDF-X I get no save dialog, no opportunity to name the resultant file and can not find a .pdf version of my test file anywhere on my harddrives.

according to ISO-IEC 10646, Zero Width Joiner and Zero Width Non-Joiner cannot be ignored in searching and sorting, so inserting these control characters kills content-based operations.

Do you have a precise reference for that? The Unicode Standard 5.0, 16.2 (p. 540) says ZWJ and ZWNJ "are ordinarily ignored by processes that analyze text content. For example, a spell checker or search operation should filter them out when checking for matches." There are exceptions to that rule for particular scripts, such as Indic. Normally these two standards are kept in sync on such matters.

Do you have a precise reference for that?

Copy and paste from the prereading -

Annex f of the English edition of the international standard character set iso-iec 10646 issued in 2003, "There is a special class of characters called Alternate Format Characters which are included for compatibility with some industry practices. These characters do not have printable graphic symbols, and are thus represented in the character code tables by dotted boxes. The function of most of these characters is to indicate the correct presentation of a sequence of characters. For any text processing other than presentation (such as sorting and searching), the alternate format characters, except for zwj [Zero Width Joiner, ed.] and zwnj [Zero Width Non-Joiner, ed.] described in f.1.1., can be ignored by filtering them out."
uri http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/

In other words, these control characters for ligation cannot be ignored in content-based processing. Using these control characters, input the content characters plus the appearance control characters for Linnæus, Cook, Dr Johnson or whatever strikes your fancy, save as HTML, and Linnæus, Cook, Dr Johnson or whatever struck your fancy is gone for good.

Tracked the discussion of this approach to ligation back to a discussion between Martin Dürst and David Opstad in 1992. Dürst wanted it for joining and non-joining German, Opstad warned that inserting control characters for appearance-based processing into plain text was technically incorrect. When this came up as an SC2/WG2 proposal, John Jenkins posted that it was contentious.

/hh

Hmm...interesting. When [editorial note .ed] is copied and pasted from TextEdit into the forum interface, it is interpreted as if it were a universal resource identifier. Where the dickens did that come from. /hh

When I print to PDF-X I get no save dialog, no opportunity to name the resultant file and can not find a .pdf version of my test file anywhere on my harddrives

Submit a bug report. Send a letter to the editor of the technical prepress paper to which you subscribe. If you do not find that this works, tell the world it does not work.

(Recalling a recent discussion that attracted post from people who proclaimed it factually false that the operating system did not support searchable softcopy.)

/hh

Just tried again after a restart, I had been in mid update with Apple software, which may have triggered the problem.

I tried with another Pages template, created bleeding graphics and inspected the result in Illustrator.

The graphic bleeds but is masked by the page trim box.

On reading the settings in ColorSync, it seems to suggest this should not be:

"Add Trimbox if needed" is checked

"Add BleedBox if needed" is checked

What are the units in the fields after?

Points?

Are they overall measures or extra measure outside the trimbox?

I am still unable to apply a name to duplicated filters. What are the naming rules?

So many questions…

So many questions…

I can imagine. I'll see what I can do, but I'm pressed as the Unicode issues come before the ICC issues. You have to be able to identify softcopy by its ISO-IEC 10646 character specifications before you can image softcopy by its ISO 15076 colour specifications.

First off, comments are not allowed inside the TrimBox / BleedBox, so what you are asking for in terms of slugs makes no sense for starters.

/hh

Didn't mention slugs (at least not for this posting).

I'll be happy enough with just bleeds to start with.

Then work my way up.

PeterBreis0807 wrote:
btw When I print to PDF-X I get no save dialog, no opportunity to name the resultant file and can not find a .pdf version of my test file anywhere on my harddrives.

Did you by any chance modify the default PDF-X filter in Colorsync? I never dared doing that, but I had your problem with copied versions.

If you did, the thing to do is to follow Henrik's proposal to log a Bug report. Do you have access to the bug reporting system? If not, does Henrik want to log the bug report? Otherwise, I can do it.

Otherwise, I can do it.

One should decide what the bug is based on what the OS is designed to support. Then one should file a bug - whether Magnus or Yvan (not me).

1. OS X is a multi-user system which means that fonts for Unicode rendering and profiles for ICC rendering can be installed for accounts, for some accounts, or for one account.

2. OS X allows sharing of colour devices between accounts on the same system and between separate systems, so several people could be printing to the same colour printer while the filter is edited.

It seems that the filter is published as soon as it is opened, even before it has a name. So, the mode of the filter and the state of the system are confusingly correlated.

There is a button to start configuring mode, but there is no button and no command to stop configuring mode and move to publishing the filter in the domains indicated.

If this were a prepress process with co-workers editing colour that customers would be paying for, then it is a bug if filter configuring mode is not distinct from filter application mode.

Further, one can make a custom filter available to ColorSync as a faceless application, but if one opens Domains and selects PDF Workflows then one gets a prompt that the filter cannot be saved.

This suggests that there is interaction of some sort between the domains architecture, the filter architecture, and the priviliges architecture.

In naming a filter, names cannot seem to contain some characters. In the top level, the filter is called PDFX-3 (a spelling mistake) but in the next lower level it is correctly called PDF/X-3.

This suggests that as in DOS and UNIX there are some characters that are not allowed in file names. This is contrary to Apple's advocacy of multilingual localisation for ICC profiles, for instance.

Passing from the system UI to the PDF/X-3 product itself, it is strange that placing a 72dpi JPEG does not produce a prompt in the Acrobat Pro verification, if the Acrobat Pro verification is instructed to prompt for anything lower than 300dpi.

With regard to Peter's question, the units in the dialogs are PostScript points. Only whole points are permissible. Postfixing the abbreviations for the international standard metric system is not allowed, for instance, mm for millimeter.

Whether PDF/X-3 has a future in OS X is unknown. Vista SP2 is to support PDF 1.5 and PDF/A which has subsumed some of the functionality of PDF/X-3. So it seems possible that what will be left is PDF/X-1a which is entirely device dependent.

/hh

What are the units in the fields after? Points?

You are working with the raw PostScript imaging model, so the units of measurement are PostScript points of which there are 72 to the US inch.

Are they overall measures or extra measure outside the trimbox?

PDF has a concept of BleedBox, TrimBox, ArtBox, MediaBox. If memory serves, what you define in Page Setup is the MediaBox. Depending on the postprocessing system, which should be discussed with the person responsible for it, the BleedBox and TrimBox should be set. The trim is set smaller than the bleed, or there is an error in the verification.

I am still unable to apply a name to duplicated filters. What are the naming rules?

If you configure a filter from the bottom up, you seemingly cannot use some characters, possibly because they can do double duty as operators.

When you start a filter by clicking the + command, and you then begin to configure the three parts of the filter, it appears that the filter is published.

Meanwhile, if you now click + to start a second filter, you are prompted by the name of the ongoing filter which is shown in inverse video.

You then type in some other name and hit the return key. This seems to end the filter configuration session, even if the settings in the session have been published while the session were open.

If you open the filter again, the behaviour seems to be the same, that is, the settings are saved as you go, and not through a conscious save command.

Adding the filters to the domains indicated seems not to be automatic, and searching in Home and Computer through the Add dialogue does not find the filter.

The filter will be available through ColorSync itself as faceless, scriptable application and so on and so forth, but how this ties in with priviliges, domains and whatnot is not known.

/hh

In other words, these control characters for ligation cannot be ignored in content-based processing.

Not only can they be ignored, by default they should be. 10646 Annex 7 is only "informative" and its phrasing in this case is either misleading or in error. The Unicode text is the correct rule for this issue.

Insofar as the ISO does have any normative rules regarding sorting/searching, they are not in 10646 but in ISO 14651, Annex A, Table 1. The entries for ZWJ and ZWNJ are:

<U200C> IGNORE;IGNORE;IGNORE;IGNORE % ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER
<U200D> IGNORE;IGNORE;IGNORE;IGNORE % ZERO WIDTH JOINER

Despite this, as far as I can tell, OS X Edit > Find does not ignore these two characters. And Pages doesn't even seem to allow you to input them.

Despite this, as far as I can tell, OS X Edit > Find does not ignore these two characters.

Try a test matrix for editable source / saved page markup / saved page description. Try a ligature that is in the Alphabetic Presentation forms and a ligature that is not in the Alphabetic Presentation Forms. The Character Palette can insert into any Apple application.

/hh