Are Form XObjects an issue for you?

[loicaigon]

Hi everyone,

I would like the community to provide feedback on forms in PDF. Note that I am not asking fillable forms (the one with user inputs). I am talking about Form XObjects as in the PDF Specifications. In a very short way to describe it, Form XObject allows re-using a content though a document. For the curious people, the complete definition awaits below

My question is: have you experienced production issues while your PDF contained such Forms XObjects? Could PitStop help you in dealing with those objects? Did you find a different workaround, and if yes, how?
Finally, what would be a good way from your point of view to tackle Form XObjects if you could have a magic wand at your disposal?

Thanks in advance for your feedback here.

Loic

A form XObject is a PDF content stream that is a self-contained description of any sequence of graphics objects (including path objects, text objects, and sampled images). A form XObject may be painted multiple times — either on several pages or at several locations on the same page — and produces the same results each time, subject only to the graphics state at the time it is invoked. Not only is this shared definition economical to represent in the PDF file, but under suitable circumstances the PDF processor can optimise execution by caching the results of rendering the form XObject for repeated reuse.

[mkayyyy]

Definitely something we ran into issues with when updating from 2022 update 1 to 2023 relating to the Add bleed action.

I raised it as an issue on the help desk and provided some example files, if you need me to send them over again let me know.

[plutinolabs]

We've had some issues with jobs that were exported out of Phoenix - which I believe use Xobjects extensively.

Some problems where fixed by making sure the rips were using the latest version of the Adobe PDF Engine. Older versions of the pdf engine were ignoring the nested layout all together and only displaying the un-nested Xobject on the rip. I've only seen this behaviour on our Fiery rips.

Other times, we get random issues where the files just won't process on our Onyx rips. I can usually make it work by importing the nested layouts into Indesign and re-exporting. This seems to remove the Xobjects from the file - then it processes fine. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly test this though to see if the rip has issues with Xobjects themselves (doesn't seem likely since it'll process other jobs with xobjects) - or the contents of the Xobjects.

Maybe an Xobject inspector would be useful, where Xobjects could be listed then viewed in isolation to diagnosed any potential problems.

[loicaigon]

Hi

Thanks for the two of you for your feedback. That's valuable info.

@plutinolabs,
"Maybe an Xobject inspector would be useful, where Xobjects could be listed"
Well you have the object browser where you can access objects and see if they are form
Or you can build an action to select forms and log them.
Did you try those options?

[plutinolabs]

@loicaigon
I do know about the object browser, and I can identify xobjects. I was more thinking of a way to view an xobject in an isolated window where you could perform profiles, actions or custom edits, then when saved would update all instances of the Xobject in the original document. Kind of like the way Photoshop has smart objects, where you can double click it and it opens another window with that content to edit.

I'm not sure if that is the way Xobjects work within a pdf (I may have got it all wrong ) or whether that kind of functionality is possible.

[dfreese]

I know I'm replying to this pretty late, but I find that I struggle with generating bleed with things inside of an XObject. I'll select a contour and add bleed around it and it just doesn't do anything.

[loicaigon]

It's never too late and I can only encourage anyone having issues with Form XObjects to keep on reporting them here.

And as far as you are concerned, I kindly invite you to keep an eye on our upcoming PitStop update 1 Release as it will solve this issue

Loic

[Bill_Hahn]

For what it's worth, PDF files that come off of the EFI/EPSSW Digital Storefront platform contain these objects as well and have historically caused errors on the Kodak Prinergy platform.

These may however be job specifications and not actual objects - which is what I think you are discussing here.