PDF woes

[Andrew Brown]

Can anyone explain what happens between the receipt of a PDF by a numeric printer and the production of proof full of errors (changes of font) that were not in the PDF provided? I appreciate that it's a RIP of some sort, but what is it that a RIP does than can change italic to bold, apparently at random, and why are all such RIPs not already on the scrap-heap and their designers, builders and sellers not exiled for ever and a day on Devil's Island?

AB

[Roger Weiner]

1.) Not all pdf files are press-ready pdf files, where the fonts are
sub-set.

2.) Sometimes the person creating the pdf file is missing the fonts in
embedded images.

3.) Assuming that the file was properly produced and all links and fonts
were in place and press-quality pdf was made at same time, there should
be no problem.

Generally, you can track back to missing fonts that were not subset
correctly or were missing in images.

Pdf files made from InDesign that were "packaged" without error and then
press-quality pdf was made, should be "golden".

Roger

[Dick Margulis]

What standard did you select when creating the PDF? If you chose one
that does not embed all the fonts, or if you used fonts that are not
embeddable, all hell can break loose.

[Dov Isaacs]

Assuming that you produced a kosher PDF/X file with all fonts embedded and that it passes Acrobat Pro preflight, there is absolutely no excuse for the type of error that you describe.

 

The problem could be the RIP, but often we can trace problems to other issues, mostly stemming from poorly trained or ignorant prepress operators. Too many print professionals are hardware geeks (i.e., they salivate over the latest “iron” - printing presses and paper manipulation equipment), but they don't understand or appreciate the need to be knowledgeable about their software and to keep it updated and current as well as to how to employ it correctly and efficiently.

 

For example, there are some prepress folks who automatically open every PDF file they receive in Adobe Illustrator to inspect and somehow “fix” or “improve” results. Unfortunately, Adobe Illustrator is not a general purpose PDF file editor; Adobe Illustrator can only safely edit PDF files that were saved from the same or newer version of Illustrator using the editability option when saving. For legal reasons, Illustrator does not use any fonts embedded in the PDF files it opens, but rather fonts resident on the system on which Illustrator is running. Thus, fonts may be substituted, text can be messed up. In addition, since Illustrator doesn't support the full PDF imaging model including mixed color spaces, colors may be mucked up, and other visual anomalies may occur. Saving such a file in Illustrator makes the problems permanent! Opening and saving PDF files in Photoshop is also a recipe for disaster!

 

I've also seen use of ancient PDF workflow products prior to the RIP process which can also ruin a modern-day PDF file. And in some cases, printers are sold a bill of goods in terms of extra workflow products to routinely run their incoming jobs against, some of which do much more harm than good.

 

           - Dov

[William Adams]

On Sep 25, 2012, at 3:12 PM, Andrew Brown wrote:

> Can anyone explain what happens between the receipt of a PDF by a numeric printer and the production of proof full of errors (changes of font) that were not in the PDF provided? I appreciate that it's a RIP of some sort, but what is it that a RIP does than can change italic to bold, apparently at random, and why are all such RIPs not already on the scrap-heap and their designers, builders and sellers not exiled for ever and a day on Devil's Island?

What do you mean by ``numeric printer''?

Do you mean that the .pdf was provided as a template and then auto-numbering / variable data was applied to it from a database?

William

--
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

[Andrew Brown]

> What standard did you select when creating the PDF? If you chose one that does not embed all the fonts, or if you used fonts that are not embeddable, all hell can break loose.

Thanks to Dick and Dov for their replies.

To start with, I followed the printer's instructions, but they played havoc with a certain number of images, all monochrome.

I then used ID's Press preset (identical to the printer's instructions except in the treatment of images), which has no compliance -- and the printer specifically asked for none -- and which has worked perfectly well in the past.

I can see no preset that has anything to say about embedded fonts but I don't think that can be the problem since there is no systematic substitution of fonts going on, just characters here and there in the wrong font.

I looked at one of the PDFs in Acrobat's preflight, which I have never done before, and which I hope never to do again. I assume, and hope, that it is the responsibility of the printer to deal with that side of things.

By numeric, William, I mean not offset, but short-run print-on-demand, generic xerox.

This printer produced a first book for me which was fine, from PDF, and with content very similar to the two volumes causing problems now. I doubt that the PDF was opened in another application, more likely they forgot to do something that needed doing. I'll know more today, perhaps, but printers tend to attribute this sort of problem to malignant divine intervention rather than explain exactly what went wrong.

AB

[Roy McCoy]

Andrew Brown wrote:

> I can see no preset that has anything to say about embedded fonts but I don't think that can be the problem since there is no systematic substitution of fonts going on, just characters here and there in the wrong font.

Individual characters in the middle of words, predominantly? That *would* be strange. I would expect it to be more a matter of entire words, in which case a formatting issue could be suspected.

> I looked at one of the PDFs in Acrobat's preflight, which I have never done before, and which I hope never to do again. I assume, and hope, that it is the responsibility of the printer to deal with that side of things.

This seems kind of an odd attitude. If the function of preflight is to find problems with files, it sounds like you're claiming a prerogative of sending files with problems to printers and expecting them to find and correct the problems as if this were a matter of course. I have a similar attitude, I suppose, in that I expect a good printer to check proofs at least against a screen PDF and catch at least anything obvious. And I don't use Acrobat's preflight much (though I do keep ID's activated). But I still wouldn't go so far as to expect a printer to correct problems with my files on an regular ongoing basis - though I suppose they've caught a fair share of my goofs over the years (blush).

> [...] printers tend to attribute this sort of problem to malignant divine intervention rather than explain exactly what went wrong.

This reminds me of Don Picard, sysop of the old Aldus Forum on Compuserve, who would speak of "whims of the computer gods" - a phrase that has remained in my vocabulary.


Roy

[William Adams]

On Sep 26, 2012, at 12:49 AM, Andrew Brown wrote:

> By numeric, William, I mean not offset, but short-run print-on-demand, generic xerox.

Oh. Language barrier. The normal English for that (here on this side of the pond anyway) would be digital.

> This printer produced a first book for me which was fine, from PDF, and with content very similar to the two volumes causing problems now. I doubt that the PDF was opened in another application, more likely they forgot to do something that needed doing. I'll know more today, perhaps, but printers tend to attribute this sort of problem to malignant divine intervention rather than explain exactly what went wrong.

Most Xerox RIPs have a pre-flighting mechanism which printers willfully choose not to use.

The problem w/ such RIPs seems to be that they're optimized for through-put and that's what the printer is concerned w/. Quality tends to be an afterthought on the part of the operators.

CS5's Press Quality setting is PDF 1.4 and subsets fonts --- most printers advocate for 1.3 (forcing the user to flatten transparency) and I believe that there were some new font structures introduced then.

I'd suggest that you get the printer to read the manual for the RIP in question, find what pdf _standard_ it has a pre-flight option for and re-submit the file at that standard and insist that the printer pre-flight the file upon receipt.

[tsuki190]

Are the letters things like fl or fi or ll?

Tom

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