Mark,
There
are a few things that you should be aware of when working with PDF's, especially
if you are going to send them to an offset printer. As with any print job,
you should check with the individual printing house to see what their
preferences are for drivers, file formats, etc. Equipment and expertise
varies greatly from shop to shop. Some shops would much rather have you
use a driver of their choice and send postscript instead of PDF, others are
happy with PDF as long as certain options have been selected in the distilling
process.
That
being said, there are some major differences between PDF Writer and
Distiller. The method you described in your e-mail of printing the files
to postscript and then distilling the file using Acrobat Distiller is the
preferred method. Distiller is much more robust and has many more options
than PDF Writer. In general you will want to either turn off image
subsampling or select the compression method to high resolution (JPEG High, 600
dpi tiffs, etc.). Furthermore, you should select 'include all fonts' in
the font substitution options. This will ensure that the file contains
everything the printer would possibly need for the image to print
accurately. The printer may further request color tagging or some other
more technical options be included as well.
PDF
Writer is not a good choice for files that will be going to an offset
printer. It works fine for quick PDFs out of Word that you are sending to
be viewed on a monitor or for a quick print from a desktop printer, but there
are certain quirks and deficiencies that make it a poor option for industrial
printing. Adobe basically substituted accuracy for speed. Some
things to notice with PDF Writer is that it uses separate settings from
distiller. You can set all your job options properly in distiller and it
will make no difference to PDF Writer. Also, the defaults in PDF Writer
are built for saving file space, almost all fonts are subsets or not included at
all and all images, text, and line art are compressed to low resolutions.
While you can adjust these settings to make them closer to your distiller
output, Writer has none of the advanced options. If your printer requires
any of them, you will be forced to use distiller. Also, I think you
will notice that your PDF Writer file size will increase closer to the size of
the distiller files once you have changed the settings to turn
off downsampling and to include all fonts.
If you
have any more questions about this or want further clarification, the Adobe
website has quite a few articles on Distiller vs. PDF
Writer. You can also feel free to contact me for more
detailed information.
If it is of any use, I am including the job options file I use with Distiller here (I am using Acrobat 4.0). It is pretty generous with file size, but it ensures I can send my PDF's to most printing houses and get proper output. Again, check with your printer to see what exactly they want, but this may help get you started. Best of luck!
Brian Clubb
Diebold Election
Systems
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-support@gesn.com [mailto:owner-support@gesn.com]On Behalf Of Mark Earley
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2002 09:03 AM
To: Support
Subject: PDf ballot artworkHas anyone used pdf artwork files generated by Adobe PDFWriter as deliverables to a printer?
The method I was taught uses Distiller and involves running the ps output through distiller outside of GEMS. These file sizes are usually in the range of 80k for an 11 inch ballot with no back. PDFWriter has smaller file sizes (approx 16K) and generates the pdf files automatically, without having to run them through distiller outside of GEMS. Both advantages over using Distiller.
Anyone have experience with this?
Mark Earley
850 422-2100 - office/fax
850 322-3226 - cell
