Advertisers, newspapers agree: PDF gives ads a real good ride

To some people, PDF means "pretty damn foolproof." To newspapers and their advertisers, that's a big comfort.

PDF, the Portable Document Format pioneered as the Acrobat suite of products by Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., enables advertisers to ship their ads to newspapers virtually hassle-free. It's becoming the delivery vehicle of choice for digital ads.

Newspapers like PDFs: "We take lots of them. We prefer them because they process a lot faster and they typically don't have problems," said Donna Yannessa, quality assurance manager of Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., which publishes the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.

Advertisers like PDFs: "My deadlines are later," said Peter Fikis, art director of Balash Advertising in Glendale Heights, Ill., who gained "about five or six hours" when he dispensed with delivery by courier.

Associated Press AdSEND does, too: "It's the only file format we accept. We moved over a million transmissions last year," said AdSEND Director Jim Farrell.

And so do graphic artists: "PDF has the potential to get printers and newspapers and magazines out of the business of learning every software program ever made," said Hal Hinderliter, director of the Center for Imaging Excellence at the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation in Pittsburgh.

What's the attraction of PDF? Several things: It's a compressed, platform-independent file that can be opened in a PDF reader, such as Adobe Acrobat, then sent to any number of output devices. Users hail the small files (quicker to transmit), lack of problems (everything, in theory, is embedded in the file), cross-platform versatility (PC or Mac, it doesn't matter) and simplicity of use.

"When you look at the purpose of it, it's kind of funny," said Bob Dagostino, supervisor of display production in the display advertising department of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, which has been accepting PDFs for four years. "It was meant as a delivery system, but now everybody is starting to tear them apart."

What they're finding is that the format can be more than a delivery system. Short of providing job tickets, a task handled by AdSEND or other delivery services, PDF is becoming widely accepted as a good way to produce ads as well as send them.

As Kara Gabbert, senior process analyst at the Chicago Tribune put it, "It's a neater package. Predictability for output is fairly high."

Problems, we got problems
PDF files are not flawless, usually because of user error. Usually -- but sometimes Acrobat introduces headaches, noted Betty Prystal, ad production support administrator at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, which accepts about 200 Pdf ads a week.

If a document is created in landscape mode, "Acrobat will automatically rotate it to portrait view," she said. "When you export them as an EPS, everything appears to be normal until you paginate and it comes out rotated."

The trick: Explaining to the advertiser not to start a job in landscape mode. "Anything we learn, we tell them," Prystal said. "We'll go out to their sites and help them set up Acrobat if they want us to."

That's one example of the time, energy and even money newspapers have invested in trying to prevent problems. (See the box below for explicit preventive measures, offered by two People In the Know.)

Some papers, such as the Plain Dealer, have supplied the software to advertisers; many have programs designed to educate advertisers as to the ins and outs of PDF.

"We actually run Adobe classes," said Rich Masotta, senior manager of advertising operations at the Boston Globe, which accepts digital ads from such major advertisers as Filene's and Macy's department stores.

Masotta explained why his newspaper supports PDF: pagination. "Any ad we took in that was camera-ready was once digital. We went out to see where the opportunities were to get those digital files." By eliminating camera-readies, Masotta explained, the Globe could dispense with the expense of scanning in such ads, and improve quality to boot.

Working with advertisers is the norm now. The Globe encourages them to build ads in Quark XPress on a Macintosh, although it's not a requirement.

At the Chicago Tribune, "we work with and educate our advertisers," said Gabbert, "encouraging them and sometimes even walking them through and ridding their system of TrueType fonts." (See box.)

Selling points Gabbert offers include later deadlines for delivering ads, fewer costs with the elimination of couriers and improved quality. "There's still some disjointedness between the job ticket and the ad order system," she said, but that's an internal problem.

Advertisers would like to know the ad got there.

"We really don't have a printout saying they got it," said Eileen Flynn, a graphic artist at Cygnet Midwest, an ad agency in Lombard, Ill., that serves eight auto dealerships.

With PDF, supporting customers is key. At Newsday on Long Island, N.Y., where more than half of the 472 remote ads one April week were PDFs, "the help desk is twice as large as we had expected," said Phil Rugile, the paper's director of information systems.

Four people work solely on prepping digital ads and talking with customers; another two people attached to advertising go into the field to train customers. "Some are receptive, some tell 'em to go away," Rugile said.

In Philadelphia, Yannessa said, there's "a lot of handholding" with advertisers, down to going over their ad creation process to find problems before anything is started. The papers' salespeople are trained in "what kinds of files we accept, what the resolutions should be, who to call if you have a question."

Preflight checking -- submitting a PDF file to an application that scrutinizes it for completeness before outputting it -- has proved essential for debugging color files. If flaws are found, "we have the operator print out the report so we can make a follow-up with the account," Yannessa said.

Getting ads from the sky into print involves a conversion somewhere along the way, because PDF files cannot simply be placed on a page -- yet. The Boston Globe is representative, although its pagination engine is uncommon.

First, a PDF is sent to a QMS printer, a low-level PostScript device, Masotta said, so that "at least we know the file would RIP somewhere." If it passes that test, it's put on a file server where "redeployed ITU members" call it up, check it visually, crop it, rename it with the ad number as stored in the paper's Atex advertising system, then send it to a Camex file server, where it gets a proprietary wrapper that will ensure it can go on a page.

In Cleveland, PDFs are converted to TIF files for output on a pagination system made by Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla. TIF files are used in Philadelphia, while the Chicago Tribune and Star Tribune make PDFs into EPS files.

A standard in the making
"PDF is great right now, and I'm sure it's going to be around for a while," said Dagostino. "But who's to say someone isn't going to come along, think it in their head and get it to us that way?"

Who, indeed? Perhaps if PDF were a standard, its existence might be assured. That door has been opened, according to Eric Wolferman, senior vice president for technology at the Newspaper Association of America of Vienna, Va., which has been working on a uniform way to distribute ads throughout the '90s.

"Part of the problem was that the only products or the only solutions were proprietary," Wolferman said, "so we kind of held off." The NAA could not endorse a proprietary product as a standard because it could be accused of restraint of trade, he explained.

When Adobe put PDF (not Acrobat, its PDF product line) into the public domain, PDF was "raised to the next level," he said -- Cgats, the Committee for Graphics Arts Technical Standards. The panel is looking at PDF as a public standard under which ad materials can be exchanged.

If Cgats adopts PDF, Wolferman said, "we as the NAA can point to Cgats and say, 'Aha, we'll use that, too.'" As vice chairman of the Cgats executive committee, Wolferman said he's working to "put everything in there that newspapers need." (Adobe also is on the panel.)

In addition, the NAA and Cgats are working to bring the American National Standards Institute along, said John Iobst, the NAA's director of advanced computer science. Nearing a first draft are two sets of rules, he said.

One would cover "complete interchange," in situations where "the person you're sending this to knows nothing" about the origins of the file and the sender knows nothing about the recipient's production shop.

A second standard would encompass situations where the sender knows the recipient's shop well enough so that fonts, for example, need not be embedded in a PDF file because they're resident at the receiving end.

In addition, the standards will be "delivery independent," Iobst said. Files will be able to be sent via satellite, phone line, the Internet or sneaker net, on diskette. Not covered will be specifications for ad workflow management, such as job tickets. "That has to do with where the ad shows up, as opposed to how the ad is produced," he said.

Coming soon
Around the corner are improvements in Adobe's PDF products, as well as new ways to employ PDFs.

Software houses soon will be able to license Adobe's Placed PDF library, allowing PDF files to be imported directly into a page-layout program, said Acrobat Product Manager Gary Cosimini. Adobe PageMaker and Quark XPress are adopting such libraries, and Adobe is discussing how newspaper industry suppliers such as Harris and System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, Calif., may adopt Placed PDF as well.

Placed PDFs are "going to be huge for newspapers," Hinderliter said, predicting that they will replace EPS files. "Placed PDFs will allow you to put 10 or 12 PDFs on the same page with art or graphics made in other applications. That's essential for electronic pagination."

The advent of PostScript 3 "will have a tremendous effect" on PDF use, too, Cosimini said. Under PS3, "PDF files can be downloaded directly to PS3 RIPs without conversion to PostScript, resulting in much faster printing times," he said. "New workflows will be possible," he suggested -- such as sending entire, "error free" pages as PDF files to remote printing sites, then on to archiving systems and the Web.

Enhanced Acrobat products, Cosimini said, will include in-RIP trapping and imposition options, as well as improved color management tools.

Two newspapers will combine PDFs and the Internet to serve customers better. At the Plain Dealer, Dagostino's people recently began taking automotive ads, which may have arrived as PDFs, massaging them for World-Wide Web display and e-mailing them to the proper web meisters for posting -- all at no charge.

Later this year in Boston, Masotta plans to post on the Web ads the Globe builds for advertisers, so they can call up their ads for approval.

Despite the ease and reliability of the Portable Document Format, he said, being able to review an ad on the Web will "help see what to expect."

-- P.W.

Adobe Systems Inc.,
(408) 536-4288;
The Associated Press,
(212) 621-1000;
EnFocus Software,
(303) 393-7282, e-mail: info@enfocus.com;
Harris Publishing Systems Corp.,
(407) 242-5000;
Newspaper Association Of America,
(703) 902-1600.

See also An ounce of prevention

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.