Cropping PDF in Acrobat or Pitstop

[Tech]

Re: Cropping PDF in Acrobat or Pitstop

This thread is still alive?

Boys, let's not make things personal here. We are all pros. The great thing about this forum is that we all bring a little bit of different working background and experience together here.

Regarding automated preflight PDF workflow (correct me if I'm wrong), magazines were one of the earliest to adept to this technology. Does it save money? Of course, it does. Is it more efficient in turnaround time and greater productivity? You bet! Now take a step back and ask yourselves... Does it help improve quality? Does it not also reduce human labor and hence job loss? Former is debatable and latter is a 100% job loss!

I spend the last 8 years in part-time magazine production (while holding two other jobs....don't ask... I burned myself out). The same magazine went from adapting Atex in the late 70s to DTP in '90s to fully automatic PDF workflow now. I wasn't there for Atex but went through at least two generations of Mac DTP workstations with them. Remember those ugly beige PowerMacs and 30lb+ monitors?

Now, ever since the switch to DTP fom Atex, most magazines have a close DTP workflow. By this, I mean they have limited font library usage; high repetitive file workflow (static hot-folders for FPO/Hi-Res images; centralized servers with backups, etc) because once their copy is in Quark layouts and Copydesk server the only chance for their files to go wrong are mostly end user errors. By adapting to automated PDF preflight system prior to press they can eliminate a lot of end user errors like forgetting to place hi-res image or not enough bleeds or some hot-shot editor wanting to make last minute changes... the old way of making last minute editorial changes will cost a lot more than just a few hundred dollars.

The point is, depending on what stage of the production process you are at now and what your past experience are, each of us will have different opinions on what the best workflow is. What work for one magazine may not work the same for another (I also freelanced some work at another magazine; similar workstation setup but never the same workflow because people works differently at different work environments). What work well at my old job may or may not apply to my current job.

We can sit here and debate all day about how great PitStop or automated PDF workflow is to publishing upstream and downstream. We can debate all the facts about how PDF and automation can save "someone' money and greater productivity. But be careful who's money you are saving and whose jobs you are cutting; have fun searching for skilled employees you actually need and find to be so-highly productive. Maybe someone needs to convince designs schools to start teaching PitStop in addition to Adobe products. God knows, how many of us former designers actually end up doing production!

There will always be someone like me here telling you guys it's not the same here or else where. As I stated before, the reality check is that different workflow requires different solutions and tools. That said, it's the people and work environment (money) that dictates workflow not dead hardware/softwares. Lastly, technology provides tools for adaptation. It's not always smarter and certainly not always faster.


Peace out.
Tech

 

[michaelejahn]

Re: Cropping PDF in Acrobat or Pitstop

*sigh*

I work for www.Magicomm.biz - so no marketing agenda here whatsoever. I ma not a consultant in this space anymore, just offering a little help with a question or two.

I was just trying to explain that much can be done to take a file that is in one condition and automatically convert it into another condition - image analysis, edge detection - OCR/ICR - deconstruction - when at ELAN, we designed tools to do EXACTLY what you described;

"What's going to happen when you receive a PDF thats off-center with all the bounding box, crop box and trim box information encompassing the media size and NOT the crop marks?"

When I worked at ELAN, we would fix a mess like that all the time !

How ? What you do is RIP the file - analyze the image, determine where 'center' is then align using algorithms. We would ignore the incorrectly - or better said - inappropriately - placed items (like incorrect MediaBox / BleedBox / TrimBox - or would perform border removal (to eliminate things like bleed/trim marks) -- many vendors (certainly not just ELAN GMK) realize that often the 'content' need to be re-positioned on a 'canvas' - and that sometimes late binding objects might 'get in the way' - such as trim marks - often, people have paper documents with three hole punch marks or other artifacts that need to be detected and removed - and done in a batch sort of way.

These are all done automatically using image processing and algorithms.

used mayI used to work for Enfocus too, no secret there - and before that Agfa, before that Scitex - all from a user perspective -

MOM !!

HE STARTED IT !!

<smile>

 

[gig0]

Re: Cropping PDF in Acrobat or Pitstop

sounds like very powerful software that centers rasterized pages within a pre-determined trim box based off the elements on a page. That'll probably come in handy in those places we've all heard about that do nothing but rip files where all the customers require everything centered within a page. Thanks for sharing. * shrugs *

 

[michaelejahn]

Re: Cropping PDF in Acrobat or Pitstop

*Double Sigh*

I guess there simply is no pleasing some people. No matter what I say, I guess it will be dismissed as irrelevant at this point. I am certain that nothing that I have ever worked on is could possibly interest you anyway, as you are absolutely convinced that you have seen everything, have it all figured out and everything is cruddy anyway.

Here is a small thought - Image processing Algorythms can do things, that when you see them for the for the first time, make you go "wow"

here is one that I have had nothing to do with, as a simple example of soemthing that perhaps you might not have thought possible;

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0708/07082201seamcarvingimageresizing.asp

So, no - what you described in your last post is not done in the manner you said, as that would be a terrible thing to do for books anyway, and here is why....

Imagine a book (which is what i 'thought' this thread "might" be about)

A book has chapter beginnings - where the content often starts somewhere about half way down from the top, followed by the chapter, which often is justified, but not always - then there are the chapter ends, where the page content is mostly at the top of the page.

You can't simply "Middle, Center, Center" this sort of thing. You can examine the content and analyze the positions and 'tweak' it (if you will permit that term) so that the page segmentation and page positioning is effected or "re-configured' to meet the desired configuration. There needs to be a way to delect too much movement. there needs to be a way to consider recto verso issues (left, right, even or odd, whatever you like to call it in your world) - simply centering a page that contains a small figure with a map will not do.

Which was why I posted in the first place.

There are many vendors who make tools to "re-publish" - for example - MarkLogic makes tools that will totally disassemble the page and re-assemble it based on rules. MerlinOne can take the prepress production PDF files and reassemble it with a interlinking (interdocument linking) - you know, so you can simply 'jump' to where that story ends on page 1 section A to the where the stroy picks up (page 8, third column.) It does this by 'learning' the structure. It places the metadata.

And yes, a PDF that has trim marks can be converted into a PDF that does not have trim marks - and much more - with full automation.

As the original poster said, hey, it is all up to money - sometimes, you hack it by hand, and sometimes, when there are 70 million books to process, you build tools. The "Search within the book" feature that is offered at Amazon.com - was all created from 300 ppi greayscale tiff files. Really. And that is just for on screen preview.

 

[disbellj]

Re: Cropping PDF in Acrobat or Pitstop

MichaelJahn,

Thanks for the link to the video. Awesome stuff. I for one thank you for your input.

Don

 

[P-Rex]

Re: Cropping PDF in Acrobat or Pitstop

If you want to check out a good resource for editing PDF files in PitStop, try this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Dig...1563636?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194144963&sr=8-1

 

[gig0]

Re: Cropping PDF in Acrobat or Pitstop

Thanks for posting a video even though (again) has nothing to do with with PitStop or Acrobat removing crop marks from a PDF. I can post really cool new technology too that has nothing to do with what we're talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsqpQDimT5U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu-6vywiAN4


I don't know where you get the idea that I think "everything is cruddy" or am a "know-it-all". Are you reading into something you want to or that's just not there, like me bashing Enfocus or something? I suggest you re-read the comments. I'm here posting questions and answers based from experience.....a grunt on the front lines, if you will. Sorry if I don't necessarily agree with you, but thats life. People disagree sometimes so get over it. Thanks for the analysis anyway, Dr. Phil.

> {quote:title=michaelejahn wrote:}{quote}
> You can examine the content and analyze the positions and 'tweak' it (if you will permit that term) so that the page segmentation and page positioning is effected or "re-configured' to meet the desired configuration.
>

I want you to step back and confirm what you've said about 'full automation' in the previous post. So you're claiming that the ELAN software is autonomous enough to differentiate between a 128 page 8.5 x 11 magazine and a 748 page 10 x 7 book both of which are floating off-center on a 11x17 media size that needs pages offset to accommodate punch holes, one sided bleeds, crossovers and type justification on random pages, all *without human intervention*? Can you confirm that there is no human intervention required? Remember, we're not talking about receiving the same files over and over again. If not, then it's just batch processing and NOT fully automated. This is what happens in the real world.

Don't get me wrong... without bruising your ego, I'm in no way trying to play down the technology....yes, something like that is still innovative but to market it otherwise to places that don't even need it is the equivalent of being a snake oil salesman. Honestly, you might as well sell 10 year annuities to my 90 year old grandmother.

There are so many variables out there and something like this only works for a small percentage of the industry. Otherwise most of us would have tools like this in our arsenal, such as PitStop. It's eye candy for most of us.