Talking callas crew at PDF Camp 2019

17 Apr. 2019 By Akash Choudhary

Events PDF Camp

Each year, PDF Camp brings a lot of our stakeholders together to discuss the utility of callas products, the company's future and wide-ranging problems (especially in prepress). This year was no different! Missed it? Well, I got some of it covered here. On to the PDF Camp news!

Just before we were gearing up for pdfToolbox 10.2 (just released), we organised yet another callas PDF Camp, which was and always has been an educational, uncommercialised event intended to educate the attendees about general PDF questions and how callas products can address their problems. callas PDF Camp is exclusive to those attending it in person. But we’ve decided to make some information available to those of you who couldn’t join us.

These 2 days observed an intensive information flow, all discussions and only one presentation. Our CTO, Ulrich Frotscher touched upon a topic that might be not just interesting, but also important: 'DEBUGGING'. He explanied the different ways in which you can accomplish debugging in pdfToolbox: Test mode, Log Profile Execution or JavaScript debugging with external tools like Visual Studio. Later during the presentation, a recognised partner had a question if 'Test mode' in Process plans will make the cut in callas tools.

The attendees were encouraged to bring both topics and problem files that they wanted to discuss with callas and other participants. In the next session, we categorised the hot topics that everyone wanted to know more about like 'advanced preflight', 'better preflight reports' where in response, Four Pees CTO, David van Driessche guided the attendees towards Preflight template report on callas GitHub, 'better bleed creation/detection' and individual questions like what is the difference between Preflight Profiles in Acrobat and pdfToolbox, if Node Red is being used in production with pdfToolbox or if it is possible to page-wise compare PDFs.

PDF Camp Berlin 2019

Attendees had the opportunity to sit down individually with the callas team to get answers to specific issues they were facing, as well as discuss best practices. One group had an important discussion about current PDF problems like conversion of SVG to Type 3 fonts when our MD, Dietrich von Seggern explained that this problem occurs because of an ambiguity in the PDF standard so that PDF files created according to one provision would not work with applications following the other. Luckily, this is a rare case which also is the reason why this issue has only recently been identified. Since SVG fonts (e.g. with emoticons) are more frequently used these days we have implemented a workaround Fixup in pdfToolbox 10.2 where, after its application, the PDF would always work. Probably the best thing about the PDF Camp is that the attendees don't just sit together with callas to discuss their problems but also share real-life tips with other attendees. Here is one by Markus Brandstätter from Calibrate Workflow Consulting:

If you have hundreds of incoming files of different complexities in your workflow, you can separate out the problem files using Quick Check to find out the size of Content streams in the PDFs. This way, you can bypass complex files to a dedicated Server and avoid speed problems in the regular workflow.

Thanks again to everyone who attended this special event. We hope you were able to learn as much as we did from these days. Stay tuned to our blogs and future events! Here some happy faces:

PDF Camp Berlin 2019

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