Adobe printer with Snow Leopard

[Elgane]

Hello.

I have an issue at work we are trying to resolve, up to now, on our workstations (IMacs), when we need to create a highrez pdf (pdfx1 most of the time) from Indesign (cs4, or 3), we don't use the export feature, because we have had some issues with it, specialy with fonts not showing up correctly in the pdf.

So instead we always print to the adobe printer, then go into printer options, find the pdf options, choose pdfx1a there, then print, tell it where to put the file, then you go back to the actual print window from Indesign, put your settings in (crop marks, etc...) and then actually print to create the pdfx1.

The thing is, we received a new IMac with Snow Leopard on it, and it seems you can't use the adobe printer anymore. So my question is, how do most people create their highrez pdfs now? Just export?

Any advice would be appreciated.
Thx!

[MJNC]

Hi Elgane;
I have never used the “Export” or “Print to .pdf” features in Illustrator. What we do here is set the doc the way you want, hit save; and then Save As. Scroll to the place where the .pdf will go, name it the way you want, and make sure the “Format” pull-down at the bottom of the box is set to Adobe .pdf.
When you then hit ok, you get another window asking you to spec the type of .pdf you want to create. Its 2 steps, but works great for us.
We are still running CS2 here, but I believe you can still do it in Snow Leopard.
Hope this helped, best of Luck!
Peace to the PrintPlanet!
_mjnc

[Stiv]

Yes, for creating PDF from InDesign CS the Export option is the correct procedure.

Regarding your fonts not being embedded - do they have embedding restrictions?

[cjwworld]

There is nothing wrong with using the export feature. The InDesign Application uses the same PDF Distiller engine as Adobe Distller has to create the PDF. Exporting feature will ask you (once you pick a place to save) what options you want. There is where you input the settings, PDFx1 or whatever.

[kyle]

Printing to the printer "Adobe PDF..." uses the same process as Distiller (I tested this once and got two files that were exactly identical except for the time created field). Exporting, however, makes use of Postscript and non-Postscript, "native" PDF language elements (transparency being the most obvious example) that are impossible to send to a printer or express in Postscript, and almost certainly would not be interpreted by Distiller if you could somehow interrupt the data stream and redirect it to a file. It does make use of the same file format (.joboptions) to save its settings, and there is a lot of overlap of the settings (e.g., converting color spaces & compressing images).

I remember several jobs with Indesign CS2 messing up the font encoding, which caused me to avoid the export feature for quite a while (we had a CPSI RIP at the time, so preserving transparency by exporting was not beneficial). I don't recall ever having that issue with CS3, and I've probably exported PDF's from CS3 over 1,000 times. I recently had similar trouble with CS4. A few paragraphs of text all in the same font was exported as a PDF, and for some reason the font was redundantly encoded (it was listed twice in the properties dialog). The text was native to the Indesign file and was all in the same text frame. I think there were no formatting changes or special characters in the frame. About half of the text used one instance of the font and the other half used the other instance. It switched back and forth randomly with no apparent pattern or trigger, and every individual line was all in the same font. Everything looked fine in Acrobat, but when processed by our RIP (which uses Adobe's APPE at its core), one of the font instances rendered correctly, but the other suffered an apparent shift from the Windows 1252 to the Mac OS Roman character encodings, turning all of the apostrophes and quotation marks into lowercase "i"s with various accent marks. When I extracted an individual page from the PDF, the problem was suddenly apparent when viewing in Acrobat, which probably had something to do with the consolidation of fonts and removal of unused objects. Maybe "Save As..." would have made the problem visible also. After updating Indesign to 6.0.4, the problem would not repeat. Interestingly, nothing relevant was listed in the release notes for the update. I still don't trust it, but I'm still exporting.

[cjwworld]

Thats very interesting Kyle.. Good explaination. I know that we used to export the file as a postscript then send to the distiller and it would work okay. So the issue is what has been changed in CS2 version? But we have been using export feature but it could be that we have a capable RIP.

[leonardr]

Originally Posted by Elgane

I have an issue at work we are trying to resolve, up to now, on our workstations (IMacs), when we need to create a highrez pdf (pdfx1 most of the time) from Indesign (cs4, or 3), we don't use the export feature, because we have had some issues with it, specialy with fonts not showing up correctly in the pdf.

Direct Export (file->Export, in InDesign) is the correct way to produce PDF files from Adobe CS applications. Period!

If you believe there is a problem with this method - please send the produced PDF, job options that you used, etc. to our support staff as a formal bug report. We're happy to investigate perceived issues.

So instead we always print to the adobe printer,....The thing is, we received a new IMac with Snow Leopard on it, and it seems you can't use the adobe printer anymore.

Correct. Adobe PDF Printer is no longer support from Snow Leopard on.

Printing to the printer "Adobe PDF..." uses the same process as Distiller... Exporting, however, makes use of Postscript and non-Postscript, "native" PDF language elements (transparency being the most obvious example) that are impossible to send to a printer or express in Postscript... It does make use of the same file format (.joboptions) to save its settings.

All of this is true! Export does directly from the native format of the application to PDF - without bothering to stop at the LOSSY Postscript format. It's why you get the highest fidelity PDFs that way.

I don't recall ever having that issue with CS3, and I've probably exported PDF's from CS3 over 1,000 times. I recently had similar trouble with CS4. ...After updating Indesign to 6.0.4, the problem would not repeat. Interestingly, nothing relevant was listed in the release notes for the update. I still don't trust it, but I'm still exporting.

Actually, there WAS something in the 6.0.4 notes about this. there was a bug in CS4 font handling for very specific situations that was corrected in 6.0.4. Definitely make sure you are up to date.

Leonard

[Elgane]

VERY interesting answers!

I will start testing directly exporting and see how that goes, if I remember correctly, the problems we had were also some reincoding of fonts, letters changing to something else, so i'l try to find one of the files that had that problem and export with CS4 6.0.4.

Thank you everybody for your insight!

[claude72]

Originally Posted by leonardr

Direct Export (file->Export, in InDesign) is the correct way to produce PDF files from Adobe CS applications.

No: export PDF works fine ONLY with PrintEngine RIPs... so, beyond the Adobe's official propaganda (made mainly to force the printers to upgrade their RIPs and give more money to Adobe), on the field the rule is simple:

- if the printer has a PrintEngine RIP, or ask explicitely for exported PDF, then export is the best solution,

- but if the printer has a PostScript RIP, better make a PS file and distill,

- and if you don't know what kind of RIP the printer has, or if you don't know who is the printer, better use the old safe method PS+distill.

Export does directly from the native format of the application to PDF - without bothering to stop at the LOSSY Postscript format.

That's another long debate... PostScript is perhaps lossy, but distilled PDF are more reliable and compatible with PostScript RIPs...
... and are sometimes more compatible with Adobe's softwares: each time I experienced problems with exported PDF, either with my RIPs, or with Acrobat or InDesign, the problem has disappeared with PS+Distiller!

... and personnaly (and I guess that many people will agree) I prefer a lossy method that works 95% of the time, to an unlossy system that crashes most often...



(Another thing that I hate with exported PDF, is that the page enlargement is set by defaut to stupid values: for an A4 pages, it's 12.408 mm...
... no doubt that it is a good value, corresponding to something usual, for people who works with inches, but I bought a french localized version, and I use millimeters as units... and I would like to have a page enlargement that match with the selected unit... 10 mm, for example!)

[cjwworld]

Originally Posted by claude72

- and if you don't know what kind of RIP the printer has, or if you don't know who is the printer, better use the old safe method PS+distill.

I do know, we have zero problems creating an PS file then distill.