We are excited to announce our new, free add-on for Adobe Express, Print Reddy. Here is a brief introduction to the basic 1.0 version, as well as some ideas about where we are headed.
Trying out the new Express last year, we were very impressed with the product, but a bit taken aback by its focus on social media, video, graphics, and imaging formats, rather than document formats and print output media. Being an Adobe product, the images it produces (and the PDF it generates), are absolutely very high quality when used in print. But there were some gaps when trying to create a print-ready PDF. We spoke with the Adobe Express team, and they welcomed our help in expanding its print capability with a free add-on. What were the gaps? Right off the bat, the absence of a bleed concept in the application was very noticeable. Bleeds are required whenever you have a graphic that is flush with the edge of the page, which is quite common in print documents. Most printers will reject files that don’t have a bleed, unless all the objects on the page are a certain distance away from the edge.
We realized that helping users create output with bleeds would be a huge step forward! Print Reddy 1.0 really does nothing else: it simply adds bleeds. You can accept the default bleed value (1/8th of an inch is the most common choice in the USA), or change this setting, and make a PDF with a bleed! Simple, but this is an essential capability for many, if not most, documents for print.
As experts at print technology, we have no shortage of ideas for further features, we’ve even built some already. One of the next features to drop will be pre-flighting, ensuring that any raster images in the document have sufficient resolution for quality output. Beyond that, we can think of many, but we’d really love feedback from Express users before going much further. What would be most useful to you? Comment below or contact us with any ideas. The philosophy of Print Reddy is three-fold:
Express is a new product, and it reminds us of InDesign when that first came out. In its early versions, InDesign did not let you make tables. Seeing a need, we created a table-maker for it. When Adobe added tables, we didn’t keep our table-maker around, but focused instead on other things that InDesign lacked. We expect that Adobe will continue to enhance the print features of Express, which is great. Print Reddy will adapt accordingly, adding enhanced capability but with minimal to no duplication.
Over the coming weeks we will be revealing more of Print Reddy Pro, which will have cost, as it comes to market. Print Reddy Pro will augment Express with features that engage our server-based renderer, providing advanced functionality that simply can’t be found in the Express client alone. CMYK color, complex pagination, complex imposition, InDesign Server rendition, and more… these are some of the features you can anticipate. Our Silicon Designer product (based on Adobe InDesign Server) already interfaces with Express: Print Reddy Pro will essentially be a seamless integration between Designer and Express, with an emphasis on making Express documents print easily, using other print technologies to provide a complete and robust solution for printing from Express. That’s it for now. We are eager for any feedback once you try out the product, and we’re especially interested in your feature requests.