The .RDO (Raster Document Object) file format is the native format used by

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from St ...

's DocuTech range of hardware and software, that underpins the company's "Xerox Document On Demand" "XDOD" systems. It is therefore a significant file format for the " print on demand" market sector, along with

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, ...

and

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital s ...

. RDO is a metafile format based on the

Open Document Architecture The Open Document Architecture (ODA) and interchange format (informally referred to as just ODA) is a free and open international standard document file format maintained by the ITU-T The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) ...

(ODA) specifications: In Xerox's RDO implementation, description and control information is stored within the RDO file, while raster images are stored separately, usually in a separate folder, as

TIFF Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format An Image file format is a file format for a digital image. There are many formats that can be used, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Most formats up until 2022 were for s ...

files. The RDO file dictates which bitmap images will be used on each page of a document, and where they will be placed.

Features and disadvantages

This approach has advantages and disadvantages over the monolithic approach used by PDF: The disadvantages of RDO are that it is a largely proprietary format, and the multi-file approach means that file management and orphan control is more of an issue: one cannot tell from a computer's file system whether all the files required for a document to print are present and correct. In RDO's favor, the multi-file approach allows a networked device to load the small RDO file and then request the larger bitmap files only when necessary: This allows a full job specification to be loaded and installed over a network almost immediately, with the larger bitmap files only having to be transferred as and when needed, allowing more flexibility for managing network traffic loading. The TIFF file format is highly portable, and Xerox's MakeReady software, supplied with its XDOD systems, readily imports and export postscript files: however, the Xerox "on demand" systems typically require a document library to be stored as RDO / TIFF files, and most non-Xerox applications will not read RDO structures directly.

References

"Document encoding formats for Phoenix: an example of on-demand publishing"
- Summary Report prepared by South Bank University
Oya Y. Rieger and Anne R. Kenney "Risk Management of Digital Information Case Study for Image File Format"
Xerox Page description languages Digital press Computer file formats

RDO RDO may stand for: * Radom Airport, Poland, IATA code * Radio Dom Ostankino, Russian broadcaster and member of the European Broadcasting Union * Ranidel de Ocampo (born 1981), Filipino basketball player * Raster Document Object (.rdo), a file f ...

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Features and disadvantages

See also

References