HELIOS PDF Server Info

Distributor of creative business solutions.                                               Home | About Us | Contact | Sitemap 

List of Suppliers:
- Equilibrium
- HELIOS
  : Future of DTP
  : HELIOS Suite
  : PDF Server
  : HELIOS Workflow
  : macademy addons
  : UGSoft addons

- Canto Cumulus
- Dynagram
- Farrukh
- Dev Zero G
- SeeFile
- Printable

Business Solutions:
- Digital Asset Mgmt
- Creative Solutions
- PDF Workflow
- Digital Distribution
- Prepress & Printing
- Document/Image Mgmt

GASAA Major Sponsor

PODi Member 2008

The time needed to process a Create PDF spool job of a 25 MB CMYK PostScript image is about 65 seconds; the processing time in Distiller is 61 seconds, while the data transfer via TCP/IP takes only 4 seconds. This clearly shows that the 'Create PDF Server' solution performs excellently by distributing the creation of PDF jobs to dedicated Macintosh- or Windows PC-based workstations or servers.

Benefits:

• Server-based automatic PDF creation from any UNIX, Macintosh, or Windows client by printing to an EtherShare/PCShare "Create PDF" print queue
• This solution will always allow customers to use the latest Acrobat Distiller software on all major UNIX platforms independent of the UNIX Distiller support from Adobe
• The "Create PDF Server" works without any local configuration of the Macintosh server, the Distiller settings can be attached to the EtherShare printer queue
• The Distiller requires a lot of computing which will be off-loaded from the UNIX server to a dedicated Macintosh server, e.g. an iMac with FastEthernet
• There is no temporary PostScript file stored on the EtherShare Server
• There is no temporary PostScript file stored on the Macintosh "Create PDF Server"
• Error Messages will be saved into the EtherShare printer accounting logfile and sent back to the user by e-mail.
• The created PDF document will be attached to the hold queue, similar to the Print Preview application.
• The created PDF document can be saved into any EtherShare/PCShare folder or into a subfolder which can be created for each user name.
• Job distribution to the next available "Create PDF Server" — EtherShare supports the balance queue which allows to have a classroom of Macintosh servers which are used to distill many print jobs in parallel.

Performance:

• Our experience shows that the Distiller can process PDF files from PostScript between 20kB/sec up to one MByte per second. This depends on the job data: images are faster, text and a lot of objects are slower, downsampling is slowing down further. The "Create PDF Server" can receive and send data up to 10 Mbytes a second, but Distiller is not able to process PostScript this fast. There is no loss of performance creating the PDF on a remote Macintosh Server.
• The Macintosh should be connected with 100Mbit Ethernet or faster. A 10Mbit network will work but will not keep Distiller busy - we recommend 100MBit.

HOT Info!

* For a descriptive overview see the HELIOS Seminar 'Going Native' PDF workflow presentation (pdf) by Ricky Patten.

* From v2.0 up, PDF HandShake supports the PDF Internet Printing feature. See the online Internet printing demo at HELIOS

* See also HELIOS news: PDF HandShake Internet printing (html)