Can anyone recommend an acrobat pro alternative?

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[Lorox]

11 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

but it cannot show color separations as per ink, knockouts / overprints

Which is exactly the basic functionality I'd generally need in my everyday workflow to check PDFs that are to be sent to a printing service...

[Boris.Volosin]

Of course it is qestion of purpose of software you are looking for. The functionality we as architects need is mostly commenting drawings, combining booklets, rotating, printing, replying comments, distribution of documents. We were not looking for advanced color speration functions or advanced printing etc. Adobe Reader itself is useless except viweing th files, it cannot do almost anything, and to buy to 60 seat office of engineers an architect 60 licences of full Adobe Acrobat only for this purpose is just too expensive and unnecessary. So for us PDF Xchange was a great solution. Proffesionall printshop etc is a different story. As for the commenting of PDF drawings PDF Xchange is for us even more pracital than Adobe Acrobat with much more options, presets of annotations etc, integration into Windows Shell. So we have successfuly cut a lot of cost by this solution, which might be not for printing service. Then Adobe Acrobat is worth the money. Generally we are looking to get rid of all Adobe fully, but purely due its pricing policy, not because it is bad software. 

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[Bruno Belo]

Incredible, Adobe have losing a lot of professionals with their strategy, i do not agree with actual Adobe market position / strategy too, i know that Adobe softwares have a great quality and years of experience and confiability, but now is other time, and affinity show this for us.

I hope that things are changing in actual scenary, and Hope so we see a new softwares to help us to have new experiences, walking to equal or best of Adobe solutions. I choice for my freelancer work to use only affinity solutions, i learning too and like it very much! Affinity helps me with performance on my old laptop, the softwares run optimized and this is very important.

 

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[loukash]

So, I have installed Ghostscript from pages.uoregon.edu/koch – v9.26 for MacOS El Capitan.
I'm a total amateur when it comes to Terminal but after studying the ghostscript.com/doc/current/Use.htm a bit as well as "gs -h", I've figured out that all I need to run is this:

gs -sDEVICE=tiffsep -o /path/to/output/folder/output.tif -r300 /path/to/input/file/affinity_pdfx3_export.pdf

The output file name apparently must have the ".tif" suffix within the command, otherwise error.
-r is the resolution switch in ppi.
"output.tif" itself will be a CMYK TIFF @ 300 ppi, no spot colors.
But additionally there will be all separations as individual grayscale TIFFs as well, named:

• output(Black).tif
• output(Cyan).tif
• output(Magenta).tif
• output(Yellow).tif

and any spot plates like:

• output(PANTONE 199 C).tif

Then I have placed the separations in ADe.
Being grayscale, they all have the "K Only" option on by default, meaning they can be colorized as a fill: C, M, Y, K + spot colors.
Then blend them as Darken.

Using another "proof of concept" ADe document's PDF/X-3 as an example (intentionally exported and processed @ 580 ppi so don't get confused by that), voilà:

Cross-checked with the PDF/X-3 in Acrobat X that still runs on El Capitan: looks correct!

On Mac, this can be partially automated via Folder Actions, AppleScript, Automator Service/Workflow/Droplet etc.
(I will go for an Automator Service plugin as I have already programmed about a dozen or so of them that I use almost daily; the shell script command will need to be slightly altered to accomodate Automator variables)

And now…

Waiting for Serif to finally implement Affinity scripting in THREE, TWO, ONE …

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[loukash]

22 hours ago, Lagarto said:

I think GS can handle only one page pdfs

That will be the next thing to check out.

22 hours ago, Lagarto said:

would probably be lost with PDF/X based exports

Apparently not.

5 hours ago, Lagarto said:

this was described already in the thread in a couple of other posts

Um… tl;dr  – at least not all of it.

5 hours ago, Lagarto said:

If you can create Apple scripts for them

I was just thinking about it while waking up (the best time of day to prepare concepts ) and it all should be scriptable up to ADe/APu creating a new document via System Events to place the TIFFs. It’s just that Automator blocks are more modular and easier to handle for a hobby scripter like me, so I will use AppleScript only where necessary. But I think everything can be run as a single AS if needed.

However, given the nonstandard Affinity UI and my earlier experiments, possibly I'd need to integrate everything into a Keyboard Maestro macro to interact with Affinity beyond just new document creation. KM seems to be sometimes able to access objects that System Events can’t. (Or that I can’t, haha)

[loukash]

On 2/12/2021 at 12:23 PM, Lagarto said:

I think GS can handle only one page pdfs

On 2/13/2021 at 11:25 AM, loukash said:

That will be the next thing to check out.

Ah, that was easy:

gs -sDEVICE=tiffsep -o /path/to/output/folder/output%d.tif -r300 /path/to/input/file/affinity_pdfx3_export.pdf

%d in output filename = page number
And if you need a real "%" in filename, escape as "%%".
And on Win console apparently you must always escape every % as %% or something. But read the ghostdocs for yourselves.

Also recommendable, among others, a switch for subpixel antialiasing of text. Available values n = 1, 2 or 4:

-dTextAlphaBits=n

More as it develops some time next week…

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[loukash]

10 hours ago, Lagarto said:

perhaps this could be handled with scripts on macOS

In the meantime I have a rough "beta" of an Automator Services plugin. It will create a folder next to a selected PDF, process the PDF through Ghostscript and place those TIFFs into the folder. At the moment it only works on one selected PDF file. I remained stuck on figuring out how to loop everything to process multiple selections without writing everything as an AppleScript loop. But eventually I'll likely end up doing exactly that…

I've been also looking for a scriptable way to place the TIFF separations into an Affinity document, but the only method to keep them fully linked in Affinity is either via Place command or via mouse drag & drop from Finder. The former could be manageable via System Events, the latter not. There is a scriptable possibility via copy & paste one TIFF by one as file proxies to create pixel layers, but the pasted images lose their attributes like file names becoming layer names. Also, there is currently no built-in scriptable MacOS method to stack the separations as layers within a single TIFF or PSD, unless either installing ImageMagick or resort to other scriptable 3rd party apps like GraphicConverter or Photoshop.

Everything else goes vastly beyond my hobbyist programming skills…

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[loukash]

12 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

I have no idea how Apple scripts (or whatever technology is currently available for system level scripting) can interact with an app that itself does not have any kind of a scripting interface or exposed document object model

AppleScript can open a document in any application and manipulate the UI via its System Events library, regardless of direct scriptability: I can tell AppleScript to run menu commands, execute existing keyboard shortcuts, click buttons or other UI elements with or without keyboard modifier, or click the mouse at a position relative to the window bounds or absolute. Some UI elements are not directly accessible because Serif apparently use nonstandard objects. For example the "»" button on an overflowing context toolbar is invisble to AppleScript. It could be only clicked by relative position to window bounds, see e.g.: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/123454-shortcut-for-lock-children/&do=findComment&comment=731465

 

[loukash]

Found some more food for thought:
http://osp.kitchen/tools/pdfutils/

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[loukash]

1 hour ago, Lagarto said:

but who knows

I just realized a much bigger issue: Affinity will rasterize any vector objects with transparencies on PDF/X-3 output.
Unlike e.g. AICS5 with exactly the same vector content.
Add a spot color to the mix and Affinity becomes useless.

That's a serious downer.

transpdfexp19.afdesign
transpdfexp19.afdesign.pdf
transpdfexp19.ai
transpdfexp19.ai.pdf

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[loukash]

29 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

rasterizing without a necessity

Alright, PDF/X-4 export can handle it without rasterizing:
transpdfexp19.afdesign.x4.pdf
Now I hope that my print guy can handle X4, too. So far they've always been happy with PDF/X-3.

Oh well.

[leob]

Hi all,

I'm the developer of PDF Checkpoint. A user pointed me to this discussion and it's good to see PDF Checkpoint mentioned on your forum.

As someone correctly mentioned earlier, PDF Checkpoint is indeed no match to hi-end tools of Adobe and Callas, nor it attempts to be such a tool (not yet at least). PDF Checkpoint targets users who need affordable basic PDF preflight and conversion.

There are many plans for further development of PDF Checkpoint, with separations preview and ink coverage being considered as well. However, there's no specific timeframe for this yet as the current major upgrades of InDesign plug-ins take priority.

If you have any questions or specific requests for PDF Checkpoint I'll do my best to address them.

Also, while myself researching the separations preview options I recently came across a tool that hasn't been mentioned here. I think many users will find it helpful. Check out the free viewer here:

https://www.packz.com/downloads-info/

The download link is on the registration page.

I'm not associated with this company in any way. But I thought it'd be good to share this info especially that their tool isn't a competitor to PDF Checkpoint anyway (not for the foreseeable future at least).

Thanks,
Leo 

[jweitzel]

8 hours ago, loukash said:

Alright, PDF/X-4 export can handle it without rasterizing:
transpdfexp19.afdesign.x4.pdf
Now I hope that my print guy can handle X4, too. So far they've always been happy with PDF/X-3.

Oh well.

PDF/X-3 must not contain transparencies per ISO norm. Therefore all *special effects* have to be rasterized to tiff. The unwanted lines, you are seeing in those PDF are mathematically "unlimited thin".

PDF/X-4 and above can contain and transport all the "modern" design effects.

Johannes

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