PDF Printing & Workflow

Romano gives a wide-ranging (if sometimes disjoint) overview of PDF's uses in prepress, with one of the most comprehensive summaries of existing Acrobat plug-ins available. Romano knows prepress, and he succeeds in giving valuable insights into the proper uses of PDF and Adobe's Acrobat products in a printing or prepress environment. Romano also knows PostScript and gives valuable insights into PS's relation to PDF. Weaknesses include cursory coverage of the Portable Job Ticket Format and zero coverage of PDF's internals (operators, data types, workings). Buy this book if you're into prepress, not if you're into web publishing.

This is an excellent resource for someone who has some basic experience with PDF files and/or digital prepress and who wants a more profound understanding of how PDF works, how to optimize its production, and what can potentially go wrong. It is *not* a book for computer beginners or people trying to learn the basics of digital printing; its apparent intended audience is publishing students or professionals familiar with the industry and its terminology. As a journal editor converting to PDF prepress, I found it helpful in explaining the steps I don't see after I ship digital files to our printing company, and very informative on the "innards" of Acrobat and PDF. The book would have benefited from rigorous copyediting to remove repetitions and to clarify the book's organization. All in all a solid reference for publishers/printers using Acrobat 3 and PDF 1.2, though some details may not apply to the just-released Acrobat 4 / PDF 1.3.