As far as I'm aware, 2nd hand scuttlebutt down here; it's been delayed a few times. Can only hope they're ironing out bugs. If I hear anything, I'll post.
Yes we upgraded a ccuple of weeks ago. Notable improvements are to the 3D softproofing and more flexibility with the imposiotions for multi web printing
Had 3.0 installed yesterday. Big improvement is that the 3D proof is now rendered AND you can choose low or highres for it.
Also some major improvements for web print impositioning.
Ink control is also added (you can tell xmf which plates to send, front and back seperately).
Also usage of guides is added.
It's now also possible to repeat custom marks in both horizontal and vertical direction.
Sorting source files is also added.
and a lot more,
worth waiting for this upgrade, stability seems to be also improved...
We got it a few days ago and it definitely is a good upgrade. Even on my old G5 it feels appreciably snappier. We don´t use the 3D proofer so it´s not a big thing for us, but the improvments in the imposition module are very good. You can tick a box and XMF won´t expose plates that doesn´t have any information on it. That saves plates.
We upgraded but beware, we had to go back to 2.5 appe, because of a bug with drop shadows that rendered as solid blocks, we decided to go back to the older verison to avoid anymore surprises, if you would like to try the file through your own RIP, PM me and ill send it to you, it gave us a bit of a shock because we run the same job every month and the designer didnt even really look at the drop shadows on the raster email proof because it was always fine before.
As for the client working better on the G5, what do you mean by "snappier", it doesnt crash? we have always used the PC client which has always been snappier than the mac version, I gave up using the mac version after it crashed the 3rd time, mind you, I am sick of trying to keep up to date with OSX versioning, how many tigers and leopards can they keep killing, the PC is much easier and has only crashed once or twice out of a 1000, so I wouldnt point the finger at XMF, that would almost certainly be an apple software issue, we have never had a problem with stability using the PC clients and one of the machines I use for remote desktop is pretty old and nasty but still doesnt crash.
It is still a great workflow, but this new version was a dissapointment for a 2.5 to 3.0 size change, should have been called 2.6.
By snappier I meant that the programme is responding quicker than before. And no crashes as of yet.
Also we´ve printed a couple of magazines that are littered with drop shadows without any of the problems you describe.
There are new versions of of the Adobe RIP (APPE 2.0 patch 7), PitStop Library and the PDF library patch (9.1.1.1). Could any of those cause the rendering of your shadows differently? Which programme were the pdfs made from?
the files were made from indesign, ive attached one of the pages if you want to give it a try, there were other drop shadows in the book and they came out fine, we had all the latest updates installed.
The document contains a Pantone colour, an RGB picture and the shadow and text in CMYK. That seems like a fairly toxic brew to me. We separate RGB files to CMYK before we put it in XMF and when I did that the drop shadow came out as it should, smooth and nice. But when I used your unmodified file and used document retargeting in XMF I get the same blocked drop shadow that you had. Was that not the case with 2.5?
We try to teach our customers to use our print profile as target when they export to pdf from InDesign. And sometimes they do just that which makes for a truly snappy workflow...
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