Adobe Press Quality PDFs

[theox06]

Hi

Having a real problem using Standard Press Quality PDFs exporting direct from InDesign. We have used these without any issue for years but in the last 4 months some images/logos have started pixelating after being exported to the Press Quality PDF.

To workaround this, we amended the press quality setting to have no compression - this solved the problem, but now our PDF files are over 1GB in size where as our press quality PDf would have been 40-50MB.

We now cannot send our large PDF though our GMG Colour RIP.

Does anyone have any ideas??? I have tried lots of variations on compression!

Thanks

The OX

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Sounds like bad structure in the InDesign fies. Why not use a PDFx standard? Could be a configuration of how transparency is handled in the RIP.

 

[mattbeals]

Maybe you need to down sample the image resolution...

 

[Shawn]

I wonder if the OPI settings have anything to do with it. I've seen some workflows get confused by OPI tags if you're not using an OPI server. It shouldn't be an issue, since the Press settings include OPI tags when converting in Distiller, but not when exporting directly in InDesign.

Maybe something is getting corrupted someplace in the settings. You can't change everything you'd need to in InDesign, but you should be able to in Distiller. Open Distiller and try unchecking "preserve OPI comments" in the Advanced tab of your Distiller settings and Save As a different name. Then go back to InDesign and try using the new setting to see if that helps.

As another option, try editing a copy of the PDF X1 or X4 settings to match your Press settings and see if that works any better.

Shawn

 

[Al Ferrari]

"Maybe something is getting corrupted someplace in the settings. You can't change everything you'd need to in InDesign, but you should be able to in Distiller. Open Distiller and try unchecking "preserve OPI comments" in the Advanced tab of your Distiller settings and Save As a different name. Then go back to InDesign and try using the new setting to see if that helps."

Shawn,

Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding was that InDesign does not use Distiller in any way. If so, settings in Distiller should have no effect on a pdf EXPORTED from InDesign, which is what the OP said he was doing.

Al

 

[Shawn]

Hi Al

Sorry I wasn't clear, I was suggesting using Distiller to change some of the joboptions settings that aren't visible from the GUI in InDesign.

All of the Creative Suite programs share a common set of .joboptions files. Depending on where the PDF is being made, different parts of the joboptions file can come into play, if those parts aren't needed, the program using them is supposed to ignore them.

He mentioned using the Press Quality setting that Adobe ships with CS. By default that setting has the OPI tags turned ON in Distiller, but OFF in InDesign. The issue he described is one I've seen when an OPI PDF is run through a non-OPI workflow so I figured that it couldn't hurt to completly turn off those settings.

As an alternative he could also just check the .joboptions out in a text editor. The correct settings to avoid OPI completely would be to have the following set:

/PreserveOPIComments false

.......

/OmitPlacedBitmaps false
/OmitPlacedEPS false
/OmitPlacedPDF false

In the default Press settings these are set to

/PreserveOPIComments true

.......

/OmitPlacedBitmaps false
/OmitPlacedEPS false
/OmitPlacedPDF false

Without knowing the complete workflow it's tough to say, but it's possible, depending on how the PDFs are processed, that the OPI comments are leading to the low res images in his PDF.

Shawn

Shawn,

Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding was that InDesign does not use Distiller in any way. If so, settings in Distiller should have no effect on a pdf EXPORTED from InDesign, which is what the OP said he was doing.

Al