Refining Issue

[PutItOnTheWindmill]

Good morning! I wanted to see if anyone had ever encountered this issue before.

We have a customer who creates his flyers in the program Pages. He creates tables in Microsoft Excel, copies those tables as images, and then pastes those images into his Pages document. When we refined the PDF that he created out of pages, some of the dollar figures in the table image changed. It wouldn't seem possible, but it's happening. We've looked at his Pages file and verified that the whole table is an image. The dollar figures that are changing are part of the table that is a calculation (in this case, 25% off list prices). Somehow the image is keeping some information that it shouldn't, and refining it is causing it to change.

 

[zoran]

If it's really an image, what you are saying is not possible.
It looks like tables are objects with text nested in pages, that would be the only explanation for change that I can think of.
Why don;t you post one of these PDF's or at least one page out of PDF with an issue and someone will figure it out.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

A placed *vector* "image" (data/file) or a placed *raster* image?


Stephen Marsh

 

[buckeye]

We've looked at his Pages file and verified that the whole table is an image.

HOW did you verify?

Erik

 

[PutItOnTheWindmill]

Let me first say that I'm not in Prepress, and apparently my original understanding wasn't correct. My graphic designer is telling me it's not an image. In the Pages file, the table is a placed PDF (it's called droppedimage.pdf, if that helps anyone). If any of you would like to look at the file, send me a PM with your email address and I'll send it to you. I can send both the Pages file and the resultant PDF.

I can tell you I watched the guy select his table in Excel, hit the buttons to 'copy..as picture' and then paste it into his Pages file. I know on the PC when you 'copy as picture' the output is either 'as shown on screen' with the options of a bitmap or a 'picture', or the other option is 'as shown when printed', and I don't know what the output file for that is. This guy is working on a Mac, so I'm not sure if the table copying results in the same sorts of output.

Again, I have the files if anyone wants to take a look. I can only tell you that my graphic designer said that it shouldn't have been possible for the values to change when we refined it, which is what is happened.

 

[zoran]

That explains it a bit better.
So it definitely is not an image but PDF is retained as text and other objects, nested inside the Pages.
In order to prevent font changing which is probably caused by subset font or similar thing, you can try outlining fonts before refine or set it to outline fonts in refine template.
Hopefully that fixes it and it is easy workaround without getting down and dirty causing ton's of wasted time.

I hope this helps.