Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

[bluskool]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

I am using PS CS3 v. 10.0.1 and Acrobat CS3 8.1.2.

> {quote:title=WharfRat wrote:}{quote}
> From reading here ...
> it sounds as if you do not have a good handle on what is going on with your file handling.

Why?

 

[Dov Isaacs]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

If you click on my name, you get my profile including e-mail address!

- Dov

 

[jun]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

since we upgrade to CS3 we use the adobe print presets for all our jobs.we just modify the print quality settings.we use preps 5.2 and prinergy 3.1.so far we are not expriencing any problem except if we use the color convert of the acrobat and apply the swop as the color profile (converting RGB to CMYK or Spot to CMYK).mask clipping and transparancies was gone.in the conversion process it removes the clipping mask and tranparency.

other than this problem we encounter,we are running smoothly on all adobe products.

 

[bluskool]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

I believe that is what is happening to my docs too. Acrobat color convert causes problems with transparency and clipping sometimes. Photoshop, on the other hand, works.

 

[leonardr]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

If you can come up with a reproducible case where Acrobat 8 or 9's Color Convert is impacting your clipping & transparency - I would VERY MUCH like to see such a file & the settings used. Please email them to me.

Leonard

 

[bluskool]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

I emailed just one example file to both you and Dov.
Please let me know what you think. Thank you,


Dan R.

 

[Dov Isaacs]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

Got it. Will work on it a bit later today, although an initial look at the PDF file shows that what looks like text is apparently text being using as a clipping path over some patterns. To make things worse, the image in the center of the page is a bunch of stitched together images. Uggh! More later.

- Dov

 

[kabel]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

After some reading here and other forums, recently we have switched to direct export from InDesign (CS3 on Mac). Prior to that I would almost always print postscript to a watched folder for Distiller to process. I sort-of miss having the watched folder and distilling in the background.

 

[bluskool]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

Yeah, it is a terrible file (technically and aesthetically). However, I just get the file and have to do with it what I can. On second thought, I could have put it in InDesign and had that convert the colors when exporting to a new PDF, but that doesn't change the fact that Acrobat ignores the clipping when converting colors.
There are a number of other reasons why a PDF must be opened in another program to correct it. For example, Acrobat can only resize objects in a PDF proportionally so if you have to stretch something .3 inches vertically, you have to open the PDF in another program.
Is it Adobe's position that there is never a good reason to open or place a PDF into another CS3 program(besides Acrobat) to fix it?

 

[Dov Isaacs]

Re: Survey about use of Acrobat on the Mac

OK, I've done some more work with the file you sent me via e-mail.

(1) I opened the RGB PDF file distilled from Microsoft Publisher via PDFMaker 8.1 (part of Acrobat 8.1) in Acrobat 9 Pro. I opened the +Convert Colors+ tool and using the default settings, converted the entire file to SWOP CMYK and embedded the profile. The resultant PDF file, which I will send to you via e-mail, has no visual anomalies beyond what was in the original file. There does not seem to be any problem with clipping paths being ignored in any way. Unfortunately, I no longer have Acrobat 8.x on any of my systems to validate your particular results, but at least we know that the problem doesn't appear to exist with Acrobat 9 Pro.

(2) I opened that same RGB PDF file in Photoshop 10.0.1 (CS3) requesting 900 dpi and SWOP CMYK. The conversion looked fine in Photoshop although obviously all text and vector goes +poof+! I then did a +save as PDF+ specifying to +not+ save the layers (no need to do that if you aren't going to re-edit in Photoshop) and joboptions for +no downsampling+ (retains 900 dpi) and +lossless 8-bit ZIP compression+. The resultant PDF file, which I will also send back to you via e-mail, is about 10.4 megabytes in size including the SWOP CMYK profile.

(3) I repeated (2) above but saved the resultant image as EPS with an 8-bit TIFF preview and lossless ASCII85 representation. That EPS file (which I +definitely won't e-mail+ to you) comes in at 236 megabytes! I then opened Distiller 9 and created a set of joboptions to do no downsampling of the image and to compress it via +lossless 8-bit ZIP compression+, tagging it as SWOP CMYK. Processing the EPS file via Distiller with such joboptions resulted in a 9.8 megabyte PDF file which I will also attempt to e-mail to you. The difference between the size of the +save as PDF+ and the distilled EPS PDF files is likely due to the fact that the distilled version does not have an embedded SWOP CMYK profile.

(4) I can only guess why your results for (2) and (3) above differed so much from mine. I suspect that when you did a +save as PDF+ you not only did no downsampling, but you also specified no compression. ZIP compression is totally lossless and there is no good reason to avoid it. But if you applied no compression +and you didn't uncheck the "save layers" option+, a 200 megabyte resultant PDF file would be expected! On the other hand, for you distillation of the EPS file, the only way you could have achieved a 1 megabyte file would have been to have used one of the standard sets of joboptions which would have (a) downsampled the entire page to 300 dpi and (b) likely would have applied lossy JPEG compression.

Bottom line is that my tests show consistency between Acrobat 9 and Photoshop and for that matter, between Photoshop's +save as PDF+ and distilling EPS of the same page. (Note that distilling EPS did have one side effect - the resultant page's background is "white" as opposed to the "clear" background of the +save as PDF+ version!)

With regards to your other questions ...

It is indeed possible to resize objects non-proportionately in Acrobat using the +object touch-up tool+. Acrobat's help facility can assist you with the various options including non-proportionate resizing, clipping, flipping, etc.

In terms of either placing or opening PDF files in other applications for purposes of corrections, that depends on what you are trying to do. Ignoring the fact that apparently Acrobat 9 Pro can certainly do what you originally wanted to do with the file you provided (convert colors and perhaps non-proportionately scale), placing a PDF file in InDesign and relying on its color conversion and resizing, positioning, and rotation capabilities should work in the general case since you are not trying to edit individual objects within the PDF file. Similarly, this would work for Illustrator assuming you place with a link; otherwise the placement may be very lossy if the original PDF file was not from Illustrator saved with the +editability+ option. We most strongly recommend against attempting to open any general PDF file in Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is +not,+ repeat +not+, repeat one more time +not+, a general purpose, full PDF editor. You may lose content, color (Illustrator only supports one color space at a time for +opened+ objects), etc. when attempting to open and edit a PDF file that was not saved with the +editability+ option from the same or an earlier version of Illustrator. Use Illustrator on PDF at your own risk! (Yes, I know that Illustrator is the tool called upon when you use the +object touch-up tool+'s external edit capability on vector, text, or any combination of vector, text, and raster objects! But that does not guarantee fidelity!) And obviously, when you open a PDF file in Photoshop, you rasterize any text and vector in that PDF file to the resolution and color space specified.

Anyway, look for your e-mail with my results and feel free to contact me with any further questions about this.

- Dov