Mako Core 8.3 is another step forward in customer-driven quality and rendering accuracy, with 21 reported improvements and continued refinement of Apex.
We have improved rendering of XPS/OXPS, particularly focused on Apex. While XPS is no longer widely used for document sharing, it plays an important role in Windows print workflows, and ensuring some of the more esoteric color, gradient and mask combinations render correctly is of benefit to all the document types that Mako supports.
This release has also given us time to work on a major improvement that we expect to deliver in Q2, and I can give you a sneak peek. When we launched Apex, Mako’s renderer that runs entirely on a GPU, the aim was performance, and we smashed it, offering up to 30x faster rendering than the existing CPU-based renderer. We followed that up with the capability to post-process on the GPU; color space conversion, halftone screening and more. Such processing is of course fast, but what is often overlooked is that the CPU is then free to carry on with other tasks.
Which got us thinking: what other processes could we improve, perhaps taking advantage of that freed-up CPU capacity? We turned our attention to writing PDF, the result of conversion from another format such as PCL, or any kind of PDF processing – color adjustment or imposition, for example.
Mako Core 8.3 release strengthens the foundations and sets the stage for what’s next: a major performance boost to PDF output, aimed at improving throughput and freeing up resources across the conversion pipeline. In high-volume workflows, PDF writing is often the throughput limiter — and that’s exactly what we’re targeting. Watch the prototype in action in the video and stay tuned — we’re looking forward to sharing more in Q2.
Mako Core 8.3 is available for download now. Pick up the release notes on our documentation site.
Visit our website for more information about the Mako Core SDK and Apex technology.
About the author
David Stevenson is the product manager for the Mako Core™ SDK and responsible for the performance component in the SmartDFE™, the AI-accelerated digital front end platform for high-speed, single-pass, roll-to-roll inkjet presses. Throughout his career, he has specialized in electronic documents, starting with Xerox Corporation as a product manager for Venture Publisher, an early star of desktop publishing on PCs. That was followed by a 13-year career at Adobe, specializing in various aspects of PDF, including creative print workflows, electronic forms and accessibility. At Helix he continues to focus on PDF technology and solutions for Page Description Languages (PDLs).
Further reading:
- Mako Core SDK 8.2 – Apex gets blisteringly fast halftone screening
- Mako Core SDK 8.1 extends GPU pipeline
- Introducing Mako Core v8 now with a revolutionary PDF renderer
- Film: Choosing a print Software Development Kit (SDK)
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