Printing issue with some complex pages - Fiery

[plotterraum]

Hi,
we print a lot for an architecture students. - They often use CAD software like Archicad to generate their floor plans, views etc.
Then, they use this to make documentation, like booklets. Which we then often print.
From time to time, I get a file, that brings the printing process to crash. - it happened again few days ago.

I link you the PDF with this one single page, that caused us the problem this time:

Test - Complex Page (heavy on vector objects).pdf

drive.google.com

Could you maybe check, if it prints without problems on your fiery?
And more important - do you have any clue, what could we do to deal with this problem - would be the best, if we could somehow automatically simplify/convert this. - in this case, I had to contact the customer, and then she changed the textures to less heavy, - but I would prefer a solution to do it inhouse. In worst case, the automatic rasterization with high dpi could do the trick, but I did not find any way to do this yet.

What I tried:
I tried all Actobat options, like preflight, - optimization, - make file smaller etc. - but this did not help.
I can of course rasterize an object in Photoshop, - but it is not really a solution, if there are plenty such objects.
I also tried to save a reduced version from EFI Fiery Impose, - but this only seems to bring everything onto one layer, but it does not simplify the content.

Thank you in advance,
Michael

 

[EdwardB]

waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many vectors. Even my workstation is having trouble just opening the files.

they either need to simplify, or export as a raster.

 

[chriscozi]

Hi,
we print a lot for an architecture students. - They often use CAD software like Archicad to generate their floor plans, views etc.
Then, they use this to make documentation, like booklets. Which we then often print.
From time to time, I get a file, that brings the printing process to crash. - it happened again few days ago.

I link you the PDF with this one single page, that caused us the problem this time:

Test - Complex Page (heavy on vector objects).pdf

drive.google.com

Could you maybe check, if it prints without problems on your fiery?
And more important - do you have any clue, what could we do to deal with this problem - would be the best, if we could somehow automatically simplify/convert this. - in this case, I had to contact the customer, and then she changed the textures to less heavy, - but I would prefer a solution to do it inhouse. In worst case, the automatic rasterization with high dpi could do the trick, but I did not find any way to do this yet.

What I tried:
I tried all Actobat options, like preflight, - optimization, - make file smaller etc. - but this did not help.
I can of course rasterize an object in Photoshop, - but it is not really a solution, if there are plenty such objects.
I also tried to save a reduced version from EFI Fiery Impose, - but this only seems to bring everything onto one layer, but it does not simplify the content.

Thank you in advance,
Michael

Did you try export as eps (v3)?
Then re-import?
That should clean up messy pdf code + fonts.
Especially since there doesn't need to be color and transparency management.
Have seen many poorly constructed pdf's from cheap pdf exporters.
Or in this case overly complex.

 

[realaqu]

just export as 300ppi tiff image, no need to print as pdf vector file

 

[ReproElectroProspero]

We get this quite a lot, very similar workflows. Our solution was to build a custom Acrobat droplet that does a bunch of preflight optimization on the file, and then run that droplet any time one of our customer's files with technical drawings makes our Fiery cry. The specific preflight optimizations are likely overkill lol, but during testing it worked well and output looked the same so we never changed it.

 

[PricelineNegotiator]

I've had a few of these as well, and the most recent one was completely solved by just printing to PDF within Acrobat. Tried a few different PDF fixups to no avail. I'll try Repro's set of fixups when I get a chance.

I did use a custom PDF .joboptions profile that keeps everything high resolution. But yeah the guy's PDF was insanely weird. I'd run it through a fixup and it'd somehow become 41 instead of 40 pages, and all the uses throughout the document of a particular font would turn into those little square/rectangles you get when the fonts default. Printing to PDF unexpectedly fixed it so I could print some simple color copies on 20# 11 x 17".

 

[bcr]

supposedly it's bad practice but when i have PDF's that just refuse to print my failsafes are as follows:

i) export to PS then re-distill
ii) convert contents of document to images.
iii) and if those and all else fails, print to PDF using the Microsoft Print to PDF driver. Don't ask me how or why that works where other options fail - it just does.

most of the problematic documents i get though are not complicated vectors, they're large scanned documents in foreign languages with corrupt OCR, non existent fonts, weird stuff outside of page margins etc.

 

[plotterraum]

We get this quite a lot, very similar workflows. Our solution was to build a custom Acrobat droplet that does a bunch of preflight optimization on the file, and then run that droplet any time one of our customer's files with technical drawings makes our Fiery cry. The specific preflight optimizations are likely overkill lol, but during testing it worked well and output looked the same so we never changed it.
View attachment 294383

I would gladly give it a try - could you maybe share the preflight setting file? thank you in advance!

 

[plotterraum]

just export as 300ppi tiff image, no need to print as pdf vector file

could you maybe specify, where should the export take place? after we received the file, from acrobat? or our client should do it? As I wrote earlier, - we are looking for a method to do it after we got the file. With students, there are often very short due dates, which we want to meet (I also used to study architecture years ago, so I feel with them). Recently we have had students that sent us their A0 Presentation Plans and Booklets literally an hour before they had their presentation - and we managed to deliver. And somehow, they got great notes for the presentation, so hey!

 

[plotterraum]

I've had a few of these as well, and the most recent one was completely solved by just printing to PDF within Acrobat. Tried a few different PDF fixups to no avail. I'll try Repro's set of fixups when I get a chance.

I did use a custom PDF .joboptions profile that keeps everything high resolution. But yeah the guy's PDF was insanely weird. I'd run it through a fixup and it'd somehow become 41 instead of 40 pages, and all the uses throughout the document of a particular font would turn into those little square/rectangles you get when the fonts default. Printing to PDF unexpectedly fixed it so I could print some simple color copies on 20# 11 x 17".

Yes, we also go this route from time to time, and I agree, that it can help. - what I am missing using Acrobat directly, is Fiery Impose, which I learned to like a lot. - also, this makes me crazy, observing the progress bar chewing so slowly through every single page

Pro-Tip: when we use Acrobat, we often start multiple instances, so that we can work on multiple file at once. - otherwise, a single instance sending data to the printer is blocked for any other activity. To start a new instance, we just go to Start - Run and input "acrobat.exe /n", which starts another instance. You can have multiple, probably only limit is the power of your workstation.

 

[ReproElectroProspero]

I would gladly give it a try - could you maybe share the preflight setting file? thank you in advance!

here it is. it's a kfp file but the system won't let me upload that. so i changed extension to .txt so it would let me. change back to .kfp before using.

 

[plotterraum]

here it is. it's a kfp file but the system won't let me upload that. so i changed extension to .txt so it would let me. change back to .kfp before using.

Thank you, will give it a try tomorrow!