Checkmate: Top, Enfocus Software's PitStop product works within Adobe Acrobat to perform a number of checks to ensure proper pre-press file reproduction. Bottom, Markzware Software's Markznet powers the AdNet site in the United Kingdom, where digital display ads are checked.

Flight of the Phoenix: Extensis' Preflight Online is a service that provides a variety of checks of common pre-press files -- including EPS, PDF and Quark XPress -- to make certain they will reproduce correctly.

PDFs are turning the ad alley
into a virtual interstate freeway

Things have certainly changed at the Tyler Morning Telegraph in the last few months.

It was not long ago that the 45,000-circulation Texas newspaper became fully paginated. And it was only about six or eight months ago that the paper's pre-press department set up an e-mail box for electronic ads.

"The first month, there weren't even 50," said Bill Campbell, the Morning Telegraph's graphics services manager. "After that, you could watch them double every month."

Now, 450 to 500 electronic ads wind their way into the Morning Telegraph system every month. While they are coming from as close as downtown and from as far away as New York, there is one common denominator. About 85 percent of them arrive in the Portable Document Format (PDF), whether on disk or on-line.

The PDF revolution, one that has been gathering steam for the last several years and rocking the foundation upon which newspapers and their advertisers exchange content, has arrived in Tyler, Texas. "We try and get everything we can in PDF," explained Campbell.

It's not just small papers that are getting caught up in the PDF revolution. Throughout the nation, advertisers and newspapers alike are dealing with more PDF files than ever before.

"A year ago about 50 percent of our ads were PDFs; now it's about 95 percent," said Mike Colonna, an information technology administrator for the North Jersey Media Group, which publishes The Record of Bergen County's Hackensack, N.J., and prints several other newspapers as part of its commercial printing operation.

The team at the Seattle Times has seen a similar growth in the number of ads sent electronically and the number of ads in the PDF format.

"We used to do 100 ads a week," said Charles Carr, digital advertising coordinator for the Times. "Now we do 100 ads a day."

Of those ads, Carr said, 98 percent to 99 percent are coming in as PDF files.

Sure, growing technological advances played a part in the increase, Colonna said. But the real shift has been one of attitude. "We had a culture change," he said. "We had to prove to our advertisers that this was the right way to do it."

With advances in pre-flighting software, which reviews PDF files to find and flag the most common errors, and with giants like the Associated Press' AP AdSEND demonstrating the value of PDFs to national advertisers for several years, more and more ad designers and creative directors are buying into the notion that PDF is the best way to exchange files with newspapers.

"Within the last year, it's really become the standard," Colonna said.

PDFs lighten many a load
For newspapers like The Record and the Tyler Morning Telegraph, the shift to PDFs has made life a lot easier.

In the old days, ads would arrive on disk in myriad native applications, everything from Quark XPress to Microsoft Word. Sometimes they wouldn't even be electronic.

"A lot of people had a tendency to create an ad electronically and then send it to us on a piece of paper," Campbell said. "You'd say, 'Can't you send it as a PDF?' and they'd say, 'I did it in Excel.'"

Newspapers would have teams of artists doing little else than converting those ads to a format that could be integrated into the newspaper's output system. And there was a good chance that there would be problems. Perhaps fonts were missing, or maybe the art elements were nowhere to be found.

There was always the chance that if the art was there, it was at 72 dots per inch (dpi) and almost impossible to use.

"It used to be that you'd be coming up on deadline and you'd have an ad on a disk with a problem," Campbell said. "You'd have to have one of your guys fix the problem. Now if you have a problem, you make a phone call and have them fix it and resend you the file."

What makes the PDF format so valuable is its overall flexibility, including its ability to work cross-platform. "There's no better format for exchanging documents than PDF," said Mark Atchley, product support manager for Enfocus Software Inc. of San Mateo, Calif., which produces PitStop pre-flight software.

Newspapers across the country are finding that it is easier for them to train their clients on how best to use Adobe Acrobat Distiller to create PDFs than to try to convert the files themselves. "We'll work with our clients to get them started," said John Mercer, pre-press manager for the Houston Chronicle.

The Seattle Times, perhaps one of the most aggressive papers when it comes to making sure advertisers use PDFs, has put together a kit that comes complete with a CD to help advertisers use the format. The kit includes a booklet with nine sections on topics that include commonly used terms and proper settings for Distiller and PostScript files.

The Digital Ad Reception Starter Kit has made a big difference, according to Carr. "I used to stay on the phone all day," he said. "Now it only rings two or three times a day."

Some news organizations have even taken the extra step of buying the software for their customers. Even AP AdSEND, which works with 3500 newspapers and advertisers, has provided Acrobat to its customers at no cost, to make it easier for them to use PDF files.

North Jersey Media Group's Colonna said that in the long run, newspapers save time and effort when they show advertisers how to convert native files to PDFs. "It's just well worth it to teach them," he said.

Like most papers, Campbell's Morning Telegraph offers phone support and is willing to do whatever it takes to help advertisers use the new format. As a result, more and more advertisers are overcoming their fears of something new and moving forward.

"When you tell customers this will improve the quality of their ad, they really like it," he said.

Now ready for prime time
While PDF has been around for quite some time -- AdSEND began using it in 1994 -- it has not always been as well suited for newspapers as it is now.

"Pre-press-related options have gotten a lot better in the last couple of years," said Joseph Schorr, a senior product manager at Extensis Inc. of Portland, Ore., which manufactures products that pre-flight PDFs.

Schorr said that early on, the format didn't handle spot color well and compressions weren't as effective. Another early problem, he said, was that PDFs were locked down and couldn't be changed.

But Schorr said that it is the newspaper industry's acceptance of the PDF format, and the evangelical fervor that has come with it, that really has brought about the increase in volume.

That acceptance wasn't easy.

"There was a reluctance all the way around," said Paul Calouri, director of AP AdSEND, which has moved more than 7 million PDF files through its system since 1994. "It comes with any change in workflow. After all, when is there a minute to think about changing anything at a newspaper?"

Calouri said that to encourage the use of PDFs, AdSEND had to make using them as simple as possible, providing training as well as software.

These days, thanks to the latest technological advances and the Internet, AdSEND is continuing to make the process as easy as possible for its clients.

Even as PDFs became more pre-press friendly and as more advertisers began accepting them, problems still ensued, Schorr said.

"The lack of experience working with Distiller and the faulty assumption that any PDF is a good print PDF led to a lot of crash-and-burns," he said, adding that PDF Writer, which had been used by some to create ads, is not pre-press friendly.

As more and more advertisers became familiar with the PDF format, and as pre-flighting became more of an industry standard, the number of crash-and-burns declined. Still, there are estimates that more than half the PDF-based ads coming into a newspaper have errors, some with fatal problems that could cause failures at the raster image processor (RIP).

Among the biggest problems are: