PDF strange squares

[simon brewer]

I created a business card in AI10 and saved it in PDF, as usual. It prints fine from AI, but when I print it from Acrobat5 it contains several squares of faded colour. On the screen in Acrobat it looks fine. The file itself is created totally in AI, is 668K, has no imports from other applications, and no objects correspond to the position of the squares. I'm using XP with 1Gb.

Does anybody know what's going on? I like to print from Acrobat as its the easiest way of excluding graphics beyond the document limits, but this thing is giving me the fear.

[Michael Griswold]

Did it have artwork that needed flattening? The squares make me think of what happens when you flatten artwork. Did you save it as Acrobat 4 or 5 pdf? What version of Acrobat did you use to open it. Could be it wasn't flattened prior to creating the pdf. Could be that it was saved in version 5 and you are opening it with Acrobat 4.

Also might try saving an eps or printing a ps file and then distill that. Usually more reliable that way...

~m

[simon brewer]

Thanks for the reply. I was saving as v5 and opening in v5 also. I'll try the flattening when I get a mo - thanks.

[simon brewer]

Michael, I tried it with and without flattening - it doesn't appear to make a difference. The document contains a flare and I think it's this that causes the problem - remove it and the squares go too. Anyway, I'll just send it off the printer and hope it won't be an issue when they print it, because it's just from Acrobat where the problem arises, not AI. Thanks anyway.

[Inger Christensen]

We have had simular problems, tried to choose file / print and use Adobe destiller. The PDF files created this way seems to be okay. The problem started after updating Adobe Acrobat to v5, with v4.0 there was no problem choosing save as pdf.

[Michael Griswold]

Simon,

Sorry I got busy for awhile there. I think Inger has a good suggestion to print to distiller and create the pdf that way. Or create a ps file and use Acrobat Distiller to distill it. Acrobat 5 supports transparency as opposed to Acrobat 4 which does not.

But if your service bureau is printing from AI, it hopefully won't be a problem.

~m

[larry grinnell]

I am seeing something similar. Here's the setup:

Illustrator EPS file created in Illustrator 10.0 (Windows 2000), saved as 7.0 with font embedding turned on (because Windows print drivers aren't as smart as Mac print drivers--Macs are smart enough to download fonts to the printer when it encounters them in placed graphics, unlike Windows). Strange square boxes appear adjacent to text entered in a home-brew TrueType font originally created in Fontographer. Analysis shows that the artist entered a Tab (ASCII 9, Octal 011) before typing the text. The file was placed in an Adobe FrameMaker 5.5 document and printed, using the Print to Distiller feature in Windows 2000. After distillation, the boxes appear where tab characters were placed originally. I opened the page of the PDF file in Illustrator, saving it out in EPS format. I opened the file in a text editor and found that Distiller substituted the Unit Separator (ASCII 31, Octal 037) character.

Funny thing is that when I had the artist select the tab character and substitute a more common font (such as Helvetica), and then reprint the document, the problem (square boxes) went away. I opened both the homebrew and the Helvetica font in Fontographer and examined the two characters (Octal 011 and Octal 037) and found no obvious difference between them (e.g., there was no art in either of those character slots in either font).

Is that weird or what? Any ideas? For now, I'm instructing the artists to lay out their text in Helvetica, and then go back and select only the actual printable characters in the homebrew font--at least until I can figure it out.

I can't convert the TrueType font to Type 1, because it makes extensive use of high ASCII characters for foreign language and other specialty characters that won't map correctly in PostScript.

Sometimes, the fun just never starts...

[Thomas Ellefson]

I've seen this a few times, and the only solution I've found is to open the file in Acrobat. Not the Acrobat Reader, full blown Acrobat. Then you can select and delete the boxes. In Illustrator they're not there, and in the Acrobat Reader they are, but only in full Acrobat can you do anything about them.

That has been my experience with them anyway. As to why it happens, I can't find any reason to it.

I talked to adobe tech support through a few different phone calls and ended up sending them a test file so they could see for themselves, I made a test page in Illustrator that was just a blank letter sized sheet with a text box in the middle where I typed something like

Frank - 50

Bob - 75

Charlie - 90

(it was the results of our football pool that year, i needed to type up something and that happened to be in front of me)

nothing else on the page, just that one text box. no graphics, only 1 font, no special characters, etc. and eventually they got back to me saying they needed the original illustrator file, but i had saved it as a pdf when i created it so they did have the original file, i didn't understand what they meant at the time, and they just responded by saying something to the effect of "well obviously this is of vital importance, your football pool results, we'll get back to you"

They never did, but now that I have full Acrobat I can just go in and select the boxes and delete them.

Good luck

tye

[simon brewer]

Thanks, guys. I finally got around the problem by converting to AI8 and saving as a PDF - the square went away, although I'll try out some of the above in future.