PRODUCT OF THE WEEK: Fujifilm XMF 2.0

摘要

The latestversion of this cross-media workflow has made major leaps from its previous incarnation. With this month's launch of XMF 2.0, Fuji has built on the success of its original XMF cross-media workflow, unveiled in March 2007, by adding new features and integrating the latest version of the Adobe PDF Print Engine, APPE2. Despite only having been around for two years, following its launch at Ipex 2006, Adobe's PDF Print Engine has rapidly become ubiquitous. The vast majority of workflow products available today are either APPE-based or APPE-enabled. The days of CPSI and all the problems that the clash between PDF functionality and PostScript-based RIPs brought now seem nothing more than an unpleasant memory. At this year's Drupa, Adobe announced the next incarnation of the PDF Print Engine, APPE2. Just as it was the first to market with an APPE-based workflow in XMF, Fuji has repeated the trick with the APPE2-based XMF 2.0. Fuji's speed to market this time round has been largely thanks to the work it did on the original XMF, which was built from the ground up using JDF and the original APPE RIP. That meant that, this time round, it was simply a case of swapping the old RIP for the newer version. "That would have been impossible in CPSI days," says Fujifilm Europe business strategy manager, workflow and software solutions, John Davies. "We would have been still trying to work out what the code we'd been given was actually doing."