Claudia McCue

It was another one of those thoroughly snakebit jobs that go wrong at every step, but at its core is a mystery concerning how QuarkXPress treats an overprinting grayscale image in an exported PDF. “Regular” overprinting objects, such as text or boxes, display and print predictably. But grayscale images are handled differently, and this results in a misleading display in Acrobat, which leads to a surprise on press. And, as you know, “surprise” is not a good word in printing.

Here’s the timeline: Continue Reading »

If you’re a print service provider who’s starting to receive CS4 files for output, you might appreciate the latest revision of the venerable Printing Guide. It’s now available here.

The PDF is fully bookmarked; open the Bookmarks panel (View>Navigation Panels>Bookmarks) to reveal the extensive list of hyperlinked topics. Additionally, the Table of Contents is hyperlinked to internal content, so it’s easy to find your way around.

Designers will find lots of useful content, too. You can select a low-res or high-res version of the 139-page guide, and you’ll also find the CS3 version of the printing guide on the same page. Both offer insights into print-specific features in the Suite applications, and provide cautions and workarounds for each application.

I’m proud to say that I’m responsible for both the CS3 and CS4 revisions, starting with the CS2 version and building on its content. Consequently, some of the content is legacy, some was contributed by other revisers during the early CS3 phase, but the final versions of both are my doing. It was a labor of love, and I’m proud of the finished pieces. I hope you find the guides a valuable resource.

Given recent upheaval at Adobe (600 layoffs yesterday, including some very dear friends), I don’t know if there will be more versions of this resource. If Adobe doesn’t spearhead an update for future CS versions (assuming there will be future CS versions, and I can’t imagine there won’t be), I’ll do it myself.

Here’s a tip for owners of Creative Suite Premium 3.3, the intermediate release that included Acrobat 9: you’re eligible for a discount! Because you’ve already paid for Acrobat 9, which is also included in Creative Suite 4 Design Premium (could they make the name just a little longer?), you don’t have to pay for it again.

Owners of plain old CS3 Premium (the one with Acrobat 8 Pro) pay $599 to upgrade to CS4 Premium. But CS3.3 owners can upgrade to CS4 Premium for $440 ($599 minus the $159 you paid for the CS3.3 upgrade).

The catch? You have to call Adobe customer service to get this special pricing. Here’s the number: 1-800-585-0774. The Adobe customer service line is open 5am-7pm Pacific time, Monday-Friday, and 6am-6pm on Saturday.

To speed up Preflight checks and fixups in Acrobat, you can create a Droplet out of any profile. Droplets can also be created from the nifty new Single Fixups and Single Checks in Acrobat 9 Pro. The Droplet icon looks like this:

A Droplet is a small application that contains preflight instructions, and allows you to batch process multiple PDFs that you wish to Preflight. Choose a profile (or create a new one), then, in the Preflight dialog, choose the Options pull-down menu and select Create Preflight Droplet. You’re given options for how the Droplet will check and process files (see below): I like to sort the PDFs into Good and Evil folders, depending on whether they pass or fail preflight. (You can name your folders anything you like.)

To run a Droplet, drag a PDF (or multiple PDFs) on top of the Droplet icon, wherever you’ve saved it. Acrobat wakes up, and processes the PDFs according to the preflight instructions contained in the Droplet.

There was one limitation in Acrobat up through Acrobat 8: While you could process an entire folder of PDFs by selecting all the PDFs and dragging them onto the Droplet, you couldn’t drag the folder itself onto the Droplet. It couldn’t see into the folder.

I was tickled to hear that the new Acrobat 9 Pro is supposed to allow us to drag a folder full o’PDFs on a Droplet for processing . . . but it doesn’t work

If you attempt to drag a folder full of PDFs onto the Droplet, you’ll receive an error — Acrobat won’t dig into the folder and reacts as if it’s an unsupported file type. Big deal — you can just select the PDFs themselves and drag them over the Droplet, as you’ve done with previous versions. But it’s supposed to work, and has been logged as a bug, so let’s hope for a fix, so we can save those few seconds (as if any of us are that efficient!).

Does your printer ask you to submit PDFs as job files, or do they ask you to send application files (page layout, plus all the necessary fonts and artwork)? Maybe we’re just slow here on the East Coast (or, more likely, justifiably paranoid), but all the printers I know ask for application files. Or, if they encourage clients to submit PDFs, they ask for the application files as a backup. (If you’ve ever tried to edit text in a PDF, you know why.)

Given the difficulty of editing PDFs (even with the big guns of PitStop), I think this is understandable. It goes beyond fixing a comma: sometimes extensive changes are necessary to make a job print predictably. For example: a solid black back cover on a brochure, if built and printed as 100K on an offset press, will be anemic and blotchy (toner-based digital presses have a more robust black). Consequently, a large solid black area is usually converted to a rich black for stronger coverage. Unless you anticipate this when building your page layout, the printer needs to be able to modify the content so the job prints to your satisfaction. Not much fun to attempt fixing this in a PDF. Continue Reading »

The latest version of Creative Suite is now shipping. If you’re expecting CS4, this isn’t it. But the new Creative Suite 3.3 is still a substantial upgrade (thus the dot version designation), thanks to the inclusion of Acrobat 9 and Fireworks. (When you purchase the upgrade, you get a disk with installers for Acrobat 9 and Fireworks only; nothing is changed for the other applications in the Suite.)

As you’ve probably noticed, Acrobat isn’t like the other kids in the box: its schedule is not synchronized with the other products in the Creative Suite stable. And, yet, it’s increasingly an integral part of the creative fabric, and Acrobat 9 Professional is full of features for creative folks to love: Continue Reading »