Page numbers changing after PDF of postscript

[CGUK]

We do magazines mainly and have a Homes and Interiors publication which I have produced for over 7 years. The workflow has changed over the years and is now a PDF one as you'd expect. We output from Quark 7.31 to a postscript file then distill using our custom job option file as provided by the printers we use. Then the files are uploaded to the Agfa Delano system for them to process.

I just had a call from them to say some of the page numbers were wrong so they removed them. The page numbers are inserted using the auto numbering in QuarkXpress and the original file is correct.

The odd thing here is it's not that pages are mixed up - it's just the page numbers that are wrong - the content of each page is correct!! The only change we have done recently is go to Acrobat 9 which obviously uses the new Distiller too - but I am still using my Acrobat 7 printer option when I go to the Print dialogue within Quark. The magazine is 128 pages if that has any bearing and the pages with wrong numbers on them are in sequence (92-111).

Has anyone seen this kind of thing before or are there any known issues with Distiller 9 that could cause this?

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

You are talking about pagination? Not the page number in the PDF file? A PDF file can be renumbered. Wrong pagination is trickier.

 

[Al Ferrari]

Why don't you export the pdf from Quark using the pdf printer from your latest version of Acrobat?

 

[CGUK]

Quark is notorious for not exporting direct to PDF very well so we have always printed to a ps file first and distilled - but we have never seen this issue in 4-5 years of doing it this way!

Lukas - the page numbers and order of the PDF itself are correct - it's the actual page numbers on the pages as they are going to be printed that come out wrong in that small section - so when we flick thru the physical mag - page 92 has the right content but the page number says 97.

I am going to PDF is again just as a test but I reckon it will come out fine - I just wondered if there were any technical reasons as to why this happened.
Thanks for your replies

 

[oxburger]

Do the files affected by the problem have a "section start" applied to any of the pages within the document? Maybe that's causing the ps distiller problems with the numbering.....

 

[leonardr]

Distiller doesn't number pages. Any such numbering is IN THE POSTSCRIPT that Distiller is processing.

The culprit is Quark - check there...

 

[CGUK]

Distiller doesn't number pages. Any such numbering is IN THE POSTSCRIPT that Distiller is processing.

The culprit is Quark - check there...

I have to say I think it must be - I used to get an issue where some of a page would be greyscale if I used the Mac whilst it was outputting to .ps or distilling.

Do the files affected by the problem have a "section start" applied to any of the pages within the document? Maybe that's causing the ps distiller problems with the numbering.....

That's a good thought but in this case I don't use sections.

Thanks for the replies