APPE 5 will support the wider colour gamuts of presses with extra inks
Adobe has announced version 5 of the Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE) RIP technology, designed to address the requirements of digital print across a growing range of substrates.
Aimed at maximising ‘colour impact in the coming generation of textile presses, industrial print stations and digital presses for label and packaging production’, APPE 5 is designed to support printing on both flat and contoured surfaces including paper, plastic, fabric, ceramics, glass and food products.
New colour features in APPE 5 support expanded colour gamut ‘CMYK+’ digital presses with additional primary colour inks or toners, which will be particularly relevant in packaging and some textile and commercial printing applications. PDF 2.0 features such as black point compensation to preserve shadow detail in colour space conversions and support for CxF (Color eXchange Format) spot colours are also implemented, as is page-level control of colour conversions for output, which will enable both greater flexibility and more automation in prepress workflows.
Other new features include built-in high speed anti-aliasing for smoother edges on graphical elements including at lower resolutions, and enhanced Unicode support which improves handling of non-Roman language character sets.
The first OEM to announce implementation of APPE 5 is Agfa, which is including it in version 11 of its Apogee prepress and workflow software.
