Newbie with questions

[critter]

I'm new here and need some help. I'm an IT guy for our newspaper. We use PitStop Server 09 and Indesign CS (yes, we're that far behind and unable to move forward due to a software vendor we're stuck with).

Our issue was with advertisements that had subset fonts. Those PDF files, when placed in an InDesign document, would randomly drop fonts. We upgraded our PitStop server to take advantage of the "fonts to outlines" ability and it cleared up a lot of our printing issues. Now I have an ad that has printed with some odd artifacts, black boxes that overlap some of the fonts that have been converted to outlines.

My question is, could this be caused by our converting fonts to outlines?

 

[InvisSoul]

Sounds like it might be drop shadows possibly making the boxes.

How are the PDF's output? Are the flattened? (PDF 1.3)

 

[critter]

The PDFs are produced outside our operation, by the advertiser. Looking at the document info on the PDF it appears they're using CS3 and doing and export as pdf. It says it's using Adobe Library 8.0 and the version is 1.3. There is indeed a drop shadow where these artifacts appeared. There also appears to be a radial screen behind all that. How would I determine if it's been flatened?

 

[mattbeals]

If it's PDF 1.3 then it's been flattened. Having said that there is a trick that people can use to set the PDF version. In PitStop you can set a PDF 1.5 document to be 1.3 and have it still retain all of the PDF 1.5 features. Best to double check with a preflight option to detect transparency or use Acrobat's flattener preview to find transparencies.

Sounds like the fonts aren't playing nice. I think it was InDesign CS that forced all fonts to CID encoding whether you liked it or not. Maybe that's the problem, not the ad itself.

 

[JasonFF]

It's not uncommon for us to recieve PDF files that don't print very well. Even with all the flattening etc features of Acrobat, sometimes the only way we can get it to come out nicely is to convert the PDF to a layerless TIFF file using photoshop. My point is that I wouldn't worry about altering your shop setup too much so that it can print all PDFs equally because in my experience this is impossible.

 

[critter]

Mat, my reading on CS in the past lead me to that same conclusion. We had several instances of sub-set fonts that dropped random characters when we'd print the page to our CTP system. That's why we upgraded PitStop Server and started using the fonts to outlines feature on those ads. Now we have this issue so I'm running out of options.

The advertiser in question is our biggest one. Even if they were our smallest one, in today's newspaper business climate we can't afford to "make good" on even one ad. So I keep trying to find ways to fix the problems.

Oh, and regarding the TIFF, we were doing that for the past year and the advertiser found out. They threw a fit and insisted we stop. Go figure.

 

[werdgot3]

If this may help: We never do export to PDFs straight from Adobe inDesign (any version).
We instead create a .ps and use Distiller with our own font embedding settings. We have found to many dropped fonts with the exporting from inDesign feature. This has been on many forums for a while now.

 

[critter]

werdgot3, we have that same practice in house and request that our advertisers never use a "library" for exporting a .pdf file. If only they'd listen. LOL.

What's everyone's take on re-frying pdf files? I think that's the right term, where you take the original .pdf file, export to an .eps and re-distill it?