In the following, we give a brief summary of each chapter in this manual. These summaries will help you find the information you are looking for.
Chapter 2 “An introduction to HELIOS PDF HandShake” discusses the use of the PDF file format as an exchange format in a prepress environment or in the printing business.
Chapter 3 “Installation” lists the requirements for the HELIOS Acrobat plug-ins, and describes the installation of the Mac tools.
Chapter 4 “Before getting started” summarizes some general information about the structure and behavior of PDF HandShake.
Chapter 5 “Set up PDF HandShake with HELIOS Admin” shows how to choose suitable PDF HandShake settings via the HELIOS Admin program on a client. The chapter describes the relevant dialogs, including options for HELIOS ImageServer users.
Chapter 6 “PDF HandShake utility programs” describes the HELIOS programs of which PDF HandShake is composed, and describes in detail how to change options and attributes of these programs manually.
Chapter 7 “Printing with PDF HandShake” describes the “pdfprint” command line tool that allows printing PDF files directly from the server without opening an application. It also describes how to specify the same print options via the PDF HandShake print plug-in for Acrobat on Mac. Using either the plug-in or “pdfprint”, you can e.g. print separations and make use of the PDF HandShake color matching features.
Chapter 8 “Create PDF Server” is a PDF HandShake feature to automate the PDF creation of any PostScript job. Configuration and setup is easy and comfortable through HELIOS Admin. In addition, the chapter shows how to set up a lower quality “Create PDF” queue, e.g. for bitmap documents in an office environment, using the Ghostscript engine instead of the Distiller for PDF creation.
Chapter 9 “PDF preflighting” is a powerful solution for analyzing and preflighting PDF files to ensure that incoming and outgoing PDF files are production compatible.
Chapter 10 “Using PDF files in a PostScript OPI workflow” describes how to use PDF files in an OPI environment. It shows how to tag color profiles to PDF high-resolution files, and explains the default behavior of the OPI server when handling PDF files.
Chapter 11 “Export for Imposition with ImageServer” shows how to export PDF files (as PostScript files) for further use in an imposition application. Final printing from the imposition software to the output device requires HELIOS ImageServer.
Chapter 12 “PDF-native OPI workflow” is about an essential component of high-volume PDF document workflows based on Adobe InDesign software.
Chapter 13 “PDF-to-PDF color conversion” introduces a hot folder based technology, which allows converting the color space of each object within a PDF document to a specified output color space.
Chapter 14 “Preferences” lists the PDF HandShake preferences and explains what they effect when set.
Chapter 15 “Example workflow” illustrates a possible production environment where a customer uses Microsoft Word for document creation and submits PDF files to his printers.
Chapter 16 “Create PDF files using Acrobat Distiller” gives instructions for how to set up the job options of the Acrobat Distiller software in order to create PDF files that are best suited for being used with PDF HandShake.
Chapter 17 “PDF Transparency” briefly lists PDF transparency requirements and features.
Chapter 18 “PDF layers” gives information on layers in PDF documents and shows how these can be viewed, selected and printed via PDF HandShake and its utilities.
Appendix A “About fonts” gives some background information about fonts, different types of fonts and the problems that can arise during printing. The appendix also explains how PDF HandShake deals with fonts.
Appendix B “The fonts we deliver” contains a list of the PostScript Type 1 fonts we include in our software package.
Appendix C “Glossary” explains some product-related terminology.