LAYOUT : the newsletter of page design

PrintWeek has reported from DRUPA that one exhibitor, Taiwan Lung Meng Tech, has invented a type of paper made from stone rather than wood pulp. Known as ‘rich mineral paper’ or RMP, it is composed of limestone powder and a non-toxic resin. It is said to be environmentally friendlier in its manufacture than conventional paper, and the product has some interesting properties such as not getting wet - you can even write on it under water with a pencil.
http://community.printweek.com/blogs/printgeek/archive/2008/06/09/drupa-stone-age.aspx
www.taiwanlm.com.tw

The Stylus Pro 7900 and 9900 large format inkjet printers, just launched by Epson, make use of 11 inks and support a spectrophotometer option for upgrading the devices into accurate colour proofers. Strictly speaking, the printers use only 10 inks at any one time but they can switch between photo black and matt black cartridges automatically, making a total of 11 cartridges loaded in the printer. In addition to either black, the other ink colours are: light black, light light black, cyan, light cyan, magenta, vivid magenta, vivid light magenta, yellow, orange and green. Epson refers to these as “UltraChrome HDR (high dynamic range) fifth generation pigment inks”. The two printers also support an optional tool called Epson SpectoProofer (based on an X-Rite spectophotometer) for calibrating and certifying colour fidelity for high-end proofing.
www.epson.co.uk

Corel has upgraded its WordPerfect Office suite to version X4. Among other things, it advances the software’s existing support for Adobe PDF files. As well as being able to export to PDF (which the suite has been able to do since version 9), WordPerfect Office X4 can now also apply basic security options to its PDFs, embed tags and export straight to PDF/A for archiving. The suite can open PDFs for editing too, according to Corel, although this is achieved through an internal scanning function that reads the text and pictures in a PDF and converts them to an appropriate WordPerfect Office format. The suite supports Microsoft Office 2007’s XML formats - DOCX, XLSX and PPTX - as well as the open source ODF formats. Windows only, £276 (upgrade £135).
www.corel.co.uk

Newspaper circulation is increasing worldwide, but not in the UK or most of Europe, according to a report issued by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) in Goteborg, Sweden. While the global sales of paid-for newspapers rose by +2.57 percent in 2007, the circulation of paid-for dailies in the UK had contracted -3.46 percent. Looking back over the last five years, UK sales had slumped by -10.14 percent. Elsewhere in Europe, despite increases in a number of countries such as Bulgaria and Moldova, most Western European countries were suffering a decline in sales of paid-for titles. Overall, European circulation figures fell by -2.37 percent in 2007 and by -5.91 percent over the past five years.

On the other hand, free daily newspapers continued their expansion, especially in Europe where they now account for almost a quarter of all newspaper circulation. The three largest free dailies in the world are all European: Leggo in Italy (1.95 million copies), Metro in the UK (1.37 million copies) and 20 Minutos in Spain (1 million copies).

The WAN report also confirms that print remains the world’s most popular advertising medium, consuming 40 percent of the expediture in the advertising market.

www.wan-press.org/article17377.html

At the commencement of DRUPA, Screen Europe was showing off the world’s first inkjet-based digital press to work with ordinary cut sheet paper rather than reels or specially formulated inkjet stock. The Truepress Jet SX uses water-based inks on either coated or uncoated paper, and is said to be capable of printing up to 1,600 sheets per hour. This kind of speed, and its support for regular cut-sheet stock, puts it on a reasonable par with small offset litho presses, but with the added bonus of variable printing (it will incorporate Adobe PDF Print Engine 2). The first Truepress Jet SX units should be available next year.
www.screen.co.jp/ga_dtp/en/news/pdf/NR080529E.pdf

Adobe has created a suite of online services called Acrobat.com and opened it up for the time being as a free public beta. Anyone can sign up during this period to try it out. The services include file sharing and storage, a PDF converter, an online word processor and web conferencing tools. It also lets Acrobat 9 users access what Adobe dubiously calls a “personal workspace in the clouds”. Acrobat.com requires Flash 9 to be installed.
www.acrobat.com

Adobe unveiled a full upgrade to its Acrobat family of software products today, Mon 2 June 2008. Acrobat 9 properly supports embedded Flash — as opposed to triggering external Flash files with JavaScript – which can be played back in Adobe Reader 9. The upgrade provides a feature called PDF Portfolios that makes it easier to combine different media types (text docs, video, audio, Flash, etc) into a single, seamless PDF presentation. Naturally, it supports the new Acrobat.com service, also launched today. The software will be available in July in English, French, German and Japanese.
Here’s the pricing:

• Acrobat 9 Pro Extended (Windows only) £619, upgrade £205
• Acrobat 9 Pro (Win, Mac) £425, upgrade £145
• Acrobat 9 Standard (Windows only) £265, upgrade £85

Acrobat 9 Pro will also be incorporated into a version 3.3 of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 box from July.
www.adobe.com/uk/acrobat

Adobe has revealed that version 2 of its PDF Print Engine will soon be made available to printer manufacturers and print providers. The original PDF Print Engine allowed end-to-end workflows that managed layout documents in native PDF format, right through to output (no PostScript, no transparency flattening). Version 2 improves support for variable data printing (VDP) and in particular for the emerging PDF/VT standard.
www.adobe.com/products/pdfprintengine

Quark took advantage of the first day of Drupa to show off QuarkXPress 8, the forthcoming upgrade to its flagship page layout package. The software presents a redesigned user interface and now comes with the ability to export to Flash built-in (rather than as an extra-cost XTension). Quark announced the following list of new features:

- Picture Content Tool: Allows users to grab, rotate, and scale  images in real-time without typing in numbers or switching from tool  to tool
- Item Tool and Text Content Tool: Smart behaviour within these tools allows for less switching between tools, even for rotation and  managing multiple items
- New Bézier Pen Tools: Draw vector graphics Illustrator-style in QuarkXPress 8
- Workspace Enhancements: Include new buttons for instant access to  master pages and exporting to PDF, EPS, SWF and HTML; plus new  split-view buttons, enhanced contextual menus, and customisable  active pasteboards
- Measurements Palette: Further enhanced to make even more functions easily accessible, including with new clickable controls for on-the-fly drop-shadow modification
- Drag-and-Drop: Drag text and pictures from the desktop, Adobe Bridge, iPhoto, or any other application that supports drag and drop. Alternatively, drag content from QuarkXPress to Photoshop,  Illustrator, Microsoft Word, and other applications for direct  editing

It is expected that copies of the software will begin shipping at the beginning of August. In the meantime, Quark is promising a free upgrade offer: anyone who buys or upgrades to QuarkXPress 7 now will receive version 8 free when it ships. We will review QuarkXPress 8 in depth in LAYOUT in the near future.
www.quark.co.uk