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Better that both Affinity and Adobe support PDF/VT-1 as part of their so-called “data merge” features. In the case of InDesign, the “data merge” was pretty much a port of some very old code from 1990's era PageMaker code. (At this point, PDF/VT support for InDesign is available only via very...

This issue has been discussed ad nauseum here and in other venues. It wasn't a matter of Pantone charging Adobe and Adobe passing along or absorbing the increased royalties. What Pantone and its parent company wanted to do was to further monetize the Pantone color definitions by having a direct...

Remember that “font” is a four letter word beginning with an F. ;) One of the biggest mistakes made by the original Adobe Acrobat team was to allow for font usage by reference only, i.e. not embedding all fonts used in a PDF file's text. Part of that decision was the assumption that at least...

If your customers use PDF/X-4 export settings from popular applications, you shouldn't be seeing any PDF structure errors at all if you are to run the PDF file through a PDF preflight verification of PDF/X-4. You should never “outline fonts” – that technique was appropriate 20 years ago with...

Many if not most digital printers actually ignore screen settings.

Some observations: (1) The preflight profile you are using is for testing the validity of PDF/X-1a files. Unless you specified that your client provide you with a PDF/X-1a file, this profile is not of much help. (2) Unless you are using a RIP/DFE that is over 15 years old, PDF/X-1a is...

This whole thread reminds me of a phone call I received over 15 years ago from a well-known writer in the print industry press. She wanted to know the technique I recommended for proper “sharpening” of images for print. My response — “properly focus the camera!”

With regards to “low resolution images,” one must be very careful in terms of what one does for “low resolution images.” (1) Some “low resolution images” such as screen shots are inherently low resolution. They match the resolution of the screen from which they are taken. Attempts to “uprez”...

Layers and/or use of transparency are not necessarily problems! If the original content uses transparency, the best practice is to leave the transparency “live” in the PDF file. The problem is what you are exactly looking for as a “problem” – layers, transparency, etc. are not necessarily a...

PPML was a great 20th century technology from the days in which there were no direct PDF RIPs PPML is effectively PostScript-based. PDF/VT is PDF/X-4 based (itself based on PDF 1.6) supporting live transparency and color management. I am not familiar with FusionPRO and cannot (and won't)...

RGB images themselves are not necessarily an issue. Modern RIPs/DFEs properly convert ICC color profile-tagged RGB images to whatever the CMYK color space is. Low resolution images (other than images that of necessity are relatively low resolution, such as screen shots) cannot be “fixed” by a...

And exactly what do you mean by “minor mistakes?” What problems are you encountering? In most cases that I have seen, problems with printing have to do with how the PDF files are created in the first place (failure to specify that fonts must be embedded or specification of improper image...

Having spent a number of years heading the ISO committee (ISO TC130 WG2/TF2) that developed the PDF/X-6 standard, I certainly believe that PDF/X-6 (based on PDF 2.0) is the way to go. The problem is that Adobe doesn't fully support PDF 2.0 (or PDF/X-6) in Acrobat and provides no way of...

If you place a non-PDF/X-4 file into an InDesign document and subsequently save that InDesign document as PDF/X-4, that placed content is also PDF/X-4-compliant. That having been said, if the original PDF being placed into the InDesign file is already degraded with flattened transparency and/or...

(y) The issue of CID-encoded fonts was totally an issue of RIPs/DFEs and various third-party PDF workflow products that either (1) simply ignored implementation of such font handling believing that CID-encoding was exclusively for them “foreign” language fonts (Asian for the most part) or (2)...

You may nitpick all you want, but I was directly involved with end-to-end PDF workflow at Adobe at that time (and through mid-2021) and worked directly with the Adobe's InDesign, Core Technology, and Print development and quality assurance teams in consultation with some major US and...

In general, PDF/X-4 is the most appropriate PDF version to export from InDesign for printing, whether for offset printing or digital printing of any form. - Dov

Problem with older Type 1 fonts from MacOS is that they are stored in the font file's resource fork as opposed to the file's data fork for which Windows has no support. Current OpenType fonts are in fact cross-platform compatible at the file level (all content in data fork). Again, older versus...

@modgraph, I looked at the PDF file you attached. What I immediately noticed is that the PDF file was produced by printing to PostScript and then converting the PostScript to PDF via Acrobat Distiller. That is a very nice 1999 style workflow. PDF production from InDesign should be done via the...

This video provides an absolutely excellent tutorial on how one can readily convert colors in Acrobat Pro. The tutorial uses Acrobat's built-in Preflight although similar capabilities are available in Callas pdfToolbox (which is actually the basis for Acrobat Preflight) and Enfocus PitStop. The...