More than just another way to make PDF files, the latest release of this venerable program packs some formidable prepress muscle.Jaws PDF Creator 4.0
Global Graphics
USA: 1-703-266-9588
U.K: (44) 1223 873800
www.globalgraphics.com
Price: $84
Minimum system requirements: Windows 98 or later
In the burgeoning market for PDF programs, few entrants have a longer history than Jaws PDF Creator. The program grew out of development work in the early 1990s by the English prepress company 5D Solutions Ltd., makers of PostScript-compatible raster image processors. It took its name from 5 Solutions' Jaws RIP.
The program debuted as NikNak in 1997 and was rechristened as part of the Jaws product line when Global Graphics bought the company a few years later. The point here is not history but roots: Jaws PDF Creator was born of the prepress industry and this is still the area in which it excels.
Unlike other PDF-making programs such as Adobe Systems Inc.'s Acrobat and ARTS PDF's Nitro PDF Pro, Jaws PDF Creator is strictly a conversion program, and it has no built-in viewer. For most users this will be fine, because with the exception of interactive tables and forms, almost all documents are best created in specialist page-layout, presentation or text-processing programs.
This is certainly true in office settings, and it's the rule of thumb in prepress environments as well. To view, edit and concatenate existing PDF files, Global Graphics offers a companion program: Jaws PDF Editor.
How It Works
Jaws PDF Creator gives you several ways to approach the conversion task. The easiest is probably to "print" to a PDF, the program using the familiar technique of mimicking a printer driver. You select the Print command in your application and select Jaws PDF Creator as your "printer," and when you click the OK button, the program creates your PDF file. In the print dialog box, you get a modest selection of controls, but behind one—your choice of Configuration—lurk the myriad options that control how a PDF can be created.
A Configuration, in the program's parlance, is an output profile (Acrobat would call it Default Settings) that collects a potentially mind-boggling array of settings under a single name. These stack up well against what Acrobat Distiller has to offer. It's easy to create new Configurations and to base new ones on existing ones. You can export your Configurations in XML format so they can be used by other Jaws PDF Creator users.
In addition to saving time, Configurations allow a single PDF sage to set up the program for everyone else in the workgroup—it's the way most people will use the program. Three pre-made Configurations come with the program: Web (72 dots per inch), Print (600 dots per inch), and Press (2,540 dots per inch).
If you're using Microsoft Corp.'s Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint under Windows (sorry, Macintosh users, so far this is a Windows-only feature), you can also create PDFs using macros. Jaws PDF Creator appears as an option in the File menu, and from here you have access to either an easy-to-use subset of the program's PDF-making options or the program's control panel with its comprehensive tool set.
This menu entry is also the portal to some handy automations, such as opening your e-mail application to immediately send off the PDF file you're about to create. Here you'll also find an option for optimizing file size for on-screen viewing and Web distribution. From these three MS Office applications, you also have the option to include in your PDF file bookmarks, hyperlinks and comments (which appear in the PDF pages as "sticky notes").
Yet another way to create PDFs using Jaws PDF Creator is with its bundled companion program, Jaws toPDF. You can drag and drop a PostScript file onto the program's desktop icon or open it directly through the program's file menu.
In any case, your PDF is created according to the settings you make in the Jaws PDF Creator control panel. Here is where you have complete control over the minutiae of the process, from font subsetting and embedding to image compression and ICC color-profile inclusion.
Prepress professionals may be disappointed when they first look here, because as extensive as these controls are, PDF/X support is notably missing. But it's not really absent, just hidden in a folder of optional plug-ins that you can choose to run or not.
Plug-ins are all the rage these days—with Jaws PDF Creator you can even write your own, if you're a PostScript adept—but you have to wonder why these things weren't simply included in the program in the first place.
Some of them, such as the ones that straighten out weird QuarkXPress procedures so they don't trip alarms in preflighting programs, are brilliant ideas that should be highlighted, not hidden.
Others, such as PDF/X support, would be better handled through a simple dialog box approach, rather than making you pick and choose among plug-ins for the flavor of PDF/X spec you want for a particular occasion (14 are on offer, not to mention a selection of Ghent PDF Workgroup-compliant formats).
It's peculiar to have to drag a plug-in file from one folder to another just to turn on a feature. This is an engineer's interface, not an office worker's or designer's.
Citation Software offers the Jaws PDF Editor Software Development Kit 3.0. Read more here.
This level of professionalism also extends to the program's documentation, for better and for worse. Its electronic manual contains some of the most candid and enlightening discussions you'll read anywhere on the subject of the problems of creating PostScript and PDF files.
But the manual can be concise to the point of incomprehensibility, and inexperienced users will be mystified by some of the feature explanations they find. The manual in general doesn't distinguish between the needs of everyday users and veteran prepress professionals. With some refinement, though, it could be a truly valuable educational resource.
How Does It Compare to Acrobat?
Jaws PDF Creator doesn't pretend to compete with Acrobat. It doesn't offer Acrobat Standard's collaborative tools, and it doesn't offer the tables and forms tools of Acrobat Pro. If you want PDF editing tools, you'll have to pony up another $59 for a copy of Jaws PDF Editor. But for the task of turning your documents into PDFs for office, Web or prepress use, it stacks up very well indeed.
Unlike many other PDF programs, Jaws PDF Creator can embed OpenType fonts (albeit in Type 1 format), the use of which is expanding rapidly in the publishing and design communities. The program's support for the many varieties of PDF/X is excellent.
Its main disadvantage is that shared by all Acrobat competitors: It doesn't come from Adobe. Since Adobe creates and maintains the PostScript and PDF standards, it always manages to keep itself one step ahead of the pack. So while Jaws PDF Creator and its non-Adobe competitors are upgrading to support the PDF 1.5 spec, Adobe has been using 1.6 since last spring.
In the world of standards, of course, basing yourself on the latest and greatest often means putting yourself out of sync with most of the rest of the world. Indeed, even Adobe recommends saving your PDFs in PDF 1.5 (Acrobat 6) format for the sake of wider compatibility with installed PDF reader programs, including its own.
Performance Issues
It's impossible to create identical output specifications in two PDF programs so you can compare their efforts side by side. But when tuning Jaws PDF Creator's Configurations as closely as possible to equivalent Acrobat Default Settings, file sizes were generally comparable. The quality of those files was also comparable, from typographic rendering to color fidelity and image clarity.
In general, Jaws PDF Creator was faster, but on a PC with a 1GHz clock speed, the difference was between 1 second and 2 or 3—certainly nothing to whine about. On older machines, the difference might be more evident, but probably not dramatically so.
Apart from their divergence on some basic features, the real difference between these two programs is the set-up involved in getting you up and running.
Although Jaws PDF Creator's MS Office integration gives it the veneer of an easy-to-use program, when you start to customize the settings—especially for output finer than a desktop printer can muster—you begin to realize that this is not the consumer-friendly product it may seem to be when performing simple tasks.
It is, in fact, a powerful high-end prepress toolbox, and novices and newcomers may find themselves foundering at the deep end of the pool. IT and prepress professionals, though, will revel at the ability to get under the hood in a way that Acrobat doesn't allow. I would never suggest dumbing the application down, but making it more accessible to the non-technically minded would be a help.
Conclusion
This is a lot of program for $84—in the bang-for-buck rating system, it's off the scale. Its avenues to high-end prepress controls are awkward, but they also open the door to systems integration at a very high level.
This gives Jaws PDF Creator a certain schizophrenic quality, as it tries to be comforting to the novice and office worker while serving the arcane needs of the workflow technician at the same time. You certainly can't criticize it for aiming too low.
The Macintosh version of Jaws PDF Creator 4.0 is expected to ship in December or January.
