Most professional applications, such as Quark Xpress, and consumer-level products, such as Microsoft Publisher 2000, can produce reasonably good quality PostScript and PDF color separations. However, in many cases, their composite output omits elements, such as trapping, or fails to define spot colors correctly, among other issues. PDF Seps2Comp merges the separations into a viewable, composite PDF, which can be handled by most prepress systems. Users assign process or spot ink values to each page of the multi-page separated PDF file. It also offers access to Pantone color libraries for ink selection.
Separations can be either positive or negative.
The new version includes an overprint preview option. As an option, PDF Seps2Comp can also include S2C Plateview. This is a separate Acrobat plug-in first demonstrated at Drupa 2000 as part of Prinergy 2.0. This allows for critical inspection of separations after composition. Actual color separation of the composite file is not included in PDF Seps2Comp or S2C Plateview, but must be done via InProduction, Crackerjack or another separation program.