Adobe® PDF Customer Spotlight
DeHart's Printing Services
DeHart's Printing Services improves an existing black-and-white on-demand digital workflow with Adobe PDF
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ABOUT
THE CUSTOMER
BENEFITS
SUMMARY www.deharts.com |
Don DeHart, president of the $11.5-million, Santa, Clara, California-based general commercial printing operation that bears his name, is not intimidated by new technoloogies. His company, which specializes in traditional offset and on-demand digital printing applications for high-end corporate clients, embraces new e-commerce technologies, digital proofing solutions, and, most recently, Adobe PDF—which is the file format of choice for 25 percent of DeHart's Printing Services' black-and-white, on-demand digital printing workflow, and 10 percent of the company's color workflow. The appeal of Adobe PDF for DeHart and his prepress team, was its true device independence, page independence, and crossplatform support for a more streamlined, time-efficient CTP environment. Although PostScript® had been the format of record for many prepress tasks executed at DeHart's Printing Services, DeHart and his prepress team, Mark Huiskens, the preflight manager, and Mike Strauss, the preflight engineer, discovered that incorporating Adobe PDF into the printing operation's existing work-flow resulted in time savings and an increase in overall efficiency, predominantly for the company's black-and-white, on-demand digital printing applications done through the Xerox DigiPath workflow. DeHart and his team were equally intrigued with the predictability of Adobe PDF and its ability to preserve layouts, with all text and graphics just where the designer placed them originally. Since early 2000, the company has invested in and implemented a series of Adobe plug-ins to assist them in bolstering their Adobe PDF workflow, including PitStop by Enfocus. "My take on
PDF is, we will see it increasing |
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"For a high percentage of the black-andwhite technical documents we produce for our corporate clients, PDF is the dominant workf low — increasing production times by more than 25 percent," DeHart reports. "Although our use of PDF on the color side of our business is lower, we anticipate PDF eventually maturing to be the dominant file format for that aspect of our business as well. PDF allows us to deal with a more efficient file size, reducing RIP timeÑwe see this as an immeasurable benefit to our black-and-white work presently, and in the future our color applications as well." DeHart predicts more commercial printers, specializing in traditional as well as on-demand digital printing, will follow suit and also embrace Adobe PDF. "It is simply a matter of evolution, so to speak," DeHart contends. "Very early on, when new technologies are introduced, you see printing companies slowly but surely moving to embrace more digital directions. You see commercial printers migrating to more digital workflows, migrating to the Internet, migrating to CTP, migrating to PDF — the printing industry is migrating away from the traditional, and this is impacting every aspect of the print production process, from print buying to job ticketing to digital file delivery and integrity to prepress functions to the pressroom to the finishing stage." In DeHart Printing Services' future, Adobe PDF is destined to play a dominant role in all print production processes, as well as remote proofing applications, DeHart and team project. The company is investing in a T1 connection to the Internet, to help expedite future Adobe PDF file exchange, primarily for remote proofing applications globally. "My take on PDF is, we will see it increasing in our business environment, it will become very integral to our digital workf low and it will continue to become an important part of how we and our customers will conduct business into the future," DeHart states. "PDF will continue to mature, and more and more commercial printers will continue to embrace it. DeHart's Printing Services, naturally, will be one of them."
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T O O L K I T Software |
Adobe
Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA 95110-2704 USA
www.adobe.com
Adobe, the Adobe logo, and PostScript are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2000 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA. BC1897 8/00
Adobe and PostScript
are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Iucorpomted
in the United States and/or other countries.