3 An introduction to
Print Preview
Print Preview is application independent; it generates a screen preview of each PostScript print job (composite or separations) you start from no matter what application.
Integration within our server
products
Print Preview is fully integrated within our server products - with EtherShare 2.6 and PDF Handshake 1.1 being required for running the software, and EtherShare OPI 2.1 being optional. The software uses the
EtherShare Admin to allow administration from any Macintosh; and it uses
PDF Handshake's built-in color management and
the product's fonts to create a correct preview of any print job you start.
Technically speaking, Print Preview is a special kind of printer queue - it adds another option to the
Connection pop-up menu you use when setting up a new EtherShare queue (compare figure
1).
Fig. 1: The Print Preview printer connection
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The "preview-then-print" workflow
A simple "preview-then-print" workflow is shown in figure
2. The illustration compares a print-only environment to an environment where Print Preview is used.
Fig. 2: Printing with and without Print Preview
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You have several possibilities of forwarding a print job from the preview queue to a printer queue: you can do it manually (by drag and drop) as illustrated in figure
2, or you can configure the program to do it automatically. This flexibility allows you to adapt Print Preview to individual environments.
If you print from your current application to a
Print Preview queue the software "prints" into a PDF file which can then be opened with the Acrobat Reader or Exchange software. You can check the fonts and colors, the composite impression and all separation plates of each page you have printed. The generated PDF file is meant to serve as a screen proof, but it can also be saved for future use, and it can even be printed from any Acrobat application, if necessary. Note that each page of the PDF file is one image and you will not be able to edit text or other elements on a page with Acrobat Exchange.
In an EtherShare OPI environment, you can perfectly use a
Print Preview queue to check whether image replacement has worked as expected.
