Bulletproof conversion software and powerful computer spec?

[bcr]

Hi folks,

Two questions today...

Are there any bulletproof software solutions out there for printing problematic PDF files? We get thousands of documents in bundles which need to printed and occasionally Adobe Acrobat or the fiery controller refuses to print them. Last time this happened I was able to print to XPS and then that printed ok. Are there any bulletproof tools in terms of printing problematic documents? Sometimes the docs are combined into one huge PDF meaning we wait 30 minutes for the fiery to rip it only to fail at the last minute without giving any reason.


Second question - any recommendations for a powerful pc for i) converting docs into pdf's, ii) combining these pdf's into hyperlinked bundles using a program such as Docs Corp PDFdocs? I'm not sure if these applications benefit from multi core or single core performance and what the bottlenecks are.

Many thanks!

 

[Sam H]

Hi, might have some ideas gained while financial research printing:
1) Sometimes it helps to redistill. Adobe used to recoil at the idea but it worked for us all the time. Amongst one of the things it'll do is to embed fonts that weren't embedded and that can cause printing to fail for the whole document ((find where the unembedded fonts are and with pitstop replace with fonts on the system. Sometimes if you haven't got the font on your machine and alast tiweeks file worked, add the successful last week document at the end of the current one and safe as teemporary name. Now go to the non embedded font and replace it with the embedded one (they'll both show up) Then just to make sure redistill. That should embed the fonts. then after success remove the tagged on last weeks file and save with the relevant name for this week)
I usually do that on a PC with Acrobat. Go for the highest quality setting and use custom size for page as you have it including trims and bleeds. Make sure you have the fonts set to download. there is the normal way from ordinary PDF to PDF, the other way is to look under advanced for PRINT AS IMAGE go for 600dpi it'll get you out of trouble. DO MAKE SURE YOU SWITCH OUTPUT AS IMAGE OFF AFTER

2)Sometimes I find that for some curious reason a file can't be printed after editing: in the page list on the left, (pullout button) extract all pages. then close the file you extracted the pages from and to save the new file, on the save as, click on the file you've just closed. It asks you if you want to replace, say yes

3)stick all the pages into Indesign (there is a plugin that enables you for the pages to go in automatically (rather than putting e.g. a 200pp book in by hand ). Then export with a flattening setting and use the resulting clearly identifyable file (something like flattened in the filename)

4)If the job is large and you can, split it in smaller sections or in Fiery rip tell it to print which sections (I would impose all and save the impo with ALL. Then I would open impose again, specify which sections to include and on saving change that in the name rather than ALL e.g. 1-4) You might well find that the problem in a whole book is perhaps only down to one page, so you might have to do some elimination printing to isolate the culprit

hopefully that's of some use to somebody

 

[bcr]

Hi, might have some ideas gained while financial research printing:
1) Sometimes it helps to redistill. Adobe used to recoil at the idea but it worked for us all the time. Amongst one of the things it'll do is to embed fonts that weren't embedded and that can cause printing to fail for the whole document ((find where the unembedded fonts are and with pitstop replace with fonts on the system. Sometimes if you haven't got the font on your machine and alast tiweeks file worked, add the successful last week document at the end of the current one and safe as teemporary name. Now go to the non embedded font and replace it with the embedded one (they'll both show up) Then just to make sure redistill. That should embed the fonts. then after success remove the tagged on last weeks file and save with the relevant name for this week)
I usually do that on a PC with Acrobat. Go for the highest quality setting and use custom size for page as you have it including trims and bleeds. Make sure you have the fonts set to download. there is the normal way from ordinary PDF to PDF, the other way is to look under advanced for PRINT AS IMAGE go for 600dpi it'll get you out of trouble. DO MAKE SURE YOU SWITCH OUTPUT AS IMAGE OFF AFTER

2)Sometimes I find that for some curious reason a file can't be printed after editing: in the page list on the left, (pullout button) extract all pages. then close the file you extracted the pages from and to save the new file, on the save as, click on the file you've just closed. It asks you if you want to replace, say yes

3)stick all the pages into Indesign (there is a plugin that enables you for the pages to go in automatically (rather than putting e.g. a 200pp book in by hand ). Then export with a flattening setting and use the resulting clearly identifyable file (something like flattened in the filename)

4)If the job is large and you can, split it in smaller sections or in Fiery rip tell it to print which sections (I would impose all and save the impo with ALL. Then I would open impose again, specify which sections to include and on saving change that in the name rather than ALL e.g. 1-4) You might well find that the problem in a whole book is perhaps only down to one page, so you might have to do some elimination printing to isolate the culprit

hopefully that's of some use to somebody

Thanks Sam! V.helpful. last time around I think I had to go with "print as image", making sure to scale to A4 (there seemed to be stuff outside of the page in the pdf - floating text box or something). Have heard of people using Pitstop server to pre-process documents to avoid these types of problems.

 

[scotts]

Last resort option is to, import into Indesign and then print to a Postscript file and then Distill that to PDF. That will for sure get rid of issues in the PDF. Flatten/kill fonts/transparencies and such. On occasion we do that for those files that just don't want to RIP.