Axel Zoeller--Taking Giant Steps

What are his thoughts on the prepress industry at present—and Heidelberg's future direction? Let's ask him . . .

PI: Much of the focus of the prepress industry this past year has been on Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). How will PDF evolve, and how will Heidelberg support it?

Zoeller: "Yes, PDF has dominated workflow discussions for the last year and a half, but the reality up to now has been that PostScript and raster- or RIP-once-output-many (ROOM) workflow solutions like Delta have been, by far, the leading systems installed in the industry. There are a variety of reasons for this, but mostly because they're highly efficient production systems that meet the needs of even high-end applications. Reproducing this type of functionality in a PDF-based workflow is taking a lot more time and resources than people had anticipated.