It actually takes place in Acrobat, but yes, depending on what type of printer you have OR the complexity of the transparency effect.
Ok, in some of the printers of the company I work for this takes place inside of the printer.
I would be VERY surprised to find a printer that perform transparency flattening - since none of the current printer description languages (PS, PCL, HPGL, etc.) support the concept of transparency. that's why Acrobat has to perform the flattening BEFORE sending to the printer.
However there works an Acrobat (on a sparc) too.
You send raw pdf,tiff,pcl,postscript or afp or whatever files to these printers. You do not neccessarily go through Acrobat on your windows,linux,whatever pc there.
The only printers that can handle a native PDF are Adobe-made Postscript Level 3 printers. Any other type of printer MUST use workstation based software to rasterize the PDF or other convert it to some other format that can be handled (eg. PCL or Postscript). That is normally Acrobat, but could well be Ghostscript, Mac OS X's Preview, etc.
And in the case of both of the other applications above, (GS and Preview), they also do transparency flattening BEFORE sending to printer - though MUCH LESS INTELLIGENTLY than Adobe does.
Some of the older machines that do not understand PDF 1.4 (which is the first version supporting transparency) do have problems with transparency.
Correct. Those older RIPS (and client software products) will end up ignoring the transparency operators and simply rendering all objects opaque.
Are you telling me that InDesing and Illustrator are performing fast for transparency effect rasterizing? This would be interesting.
Transparency flattening - yes. Both of those products will flatten or printing faster than Acrobat does.
Ghostscript does all the pdf rendering using postscript programms and has some serious bugs when it comes to transparency.
It most certainly does! Raph did a great job on attempting to support transparency in GS8, but it's quite imcomplete - esp. when it comes to printing the stuff. It just rasterizes the whole page and sends a bitmap :(.
I would not recommend to use transparency effects in high speed printing environments but however this might change at the time the rasterizers are improved.
Completely agreed.
Leonard -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Chief Technical Officer <http://www.pdfsages.com> PDF Sages, Inc. 215-629-3700 (voice) 215-629-0789 (fax)
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