Week 8 • Winter 2021 • Ahmed Sagarwala

PDF/vt

Portable Document Format:
Variable Data & Transactional

Transactional?

Transactional Printing

• VDP with a greater reliance on relational data
• Data-driven / transaction driven
• Autonomous
• Streaming direct to output device
• Templated with scalability (multi-page)

PDF/VT, an ISO Standard

• ISO 16612-2
• Established in 2010 (reviewing in 2020)
• Based on PDF/X-4
• Includes some PDF/X-5 features
• Several benefits...

Hypothetical scenario: Energy Co.

• Energy bill
• Monthly mailing
• Average PDF file for a customer is ~3 MB
• 100,000 customers

31% of Americans have trouble paying energy bills (NPR, 2018)
Geography played a minor role. Print implications?

Hypothetical scenario: Energy Co.

• 100,000 bills to mail per month
• 300,000 MB = 300 GB
• Have fun printing that file 😈

How could we improve output process?

How PDF/Vt it works

• Digital master pages
• Tagged fields (metadata)
• Dynamic content replacement based on database
• Image slices (XObjects) with dynamic zones
• Embedded assets (fonts, data, images)

• Initial image is ~3 MB
• Static areas is ~2.5 MB
• Cropped area is ~0.5MB (JPEG Compressed)

Source: Dov Isaacs, Adobe, 2013

Back to the energy co.

• 100,000 bills to mail per month
• 300,000 MB = 300 GB 🥺
• Master file would be 3 MB
• Record overhead 0.020 MB
• 0.02 x 100,000 + 3 = 2,003 MB (2GB) 🤘

But wait, there's more!

PDF/VT Benefits

• All layout + data in one file
• Externally linked objects (PDF/VT-2)
• Streaming (PDF/VT-2s)
• Transparency, trapping, spot color support
• ICC profiles and support for standard color spaces
• 16-bit images (not all RIPs support this)
• Less RIP and overall processing time
• On-screen proofing is accurate and fast

PDF/VT pitfalls

• No interactive elements (videos / music / 3D objects)
• Annotations are a bad idea
• Avoid too much transparency (flat is better)
• Editing the output PDF?
• Fonts must be fully embedded (copyright)
• No encryption, security, JavaScript, transfer curves
• Limited compression options for images
• No OPI (Open Prepress Interface) support