Claudia McCue

NOTE: Please read the comments, as well as my “Later Notes” at the end of this post. While this post and the solutions offered by commenters all provide improved methods for cropping PDFs, there are still some catches.
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If you’ve ever used the Crop tool in Acrobat, you’ve probably discovered that it doesn’t really crop: it just masks out content. Other applications may ignore the mask and reveal the stuff you were trying to delete. And since content is not deleted, there’s no reduction in file size.

Here, I’ve added a big honking half-inch bleed in Illustrator to make it obvious. The red border is the bleed (natch).

Let’s say I want to delete the bleed, just leaving the trim area of the PDF. I could use the Crop tool, but that’s not exact. Instead, knowing that I have 0.5″ bleed, I launch the Set Page Boxes tool under the Print Production tools. I choose CropBox from the pulldown at the top of the dialog, and enter 0.5″ in all the Margin Control fields. When I click OK, it appears that I have cropped the PDF to the trim. Whee!

But heartbreak awaits me when I return to the Set Page Boxes dialog to check it…Doh! The rind isn’t gone! Like a persistent zombie in a bad horror flick, it’s still there.

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Let’s get something straight: Photoshop is NOT a page layout program!

While it’s been true that we could create text and vector shapes for some time in Photoshop, the addition of Paragraph and Character styles in Photoshop CS6 made me cringe—it’s like an endorsement of bad behavior.

I understand that someone who knows only Photoshop might be tempted to create projects with text in Photoshop. I recently heard of a photographyer submitting his files for an 80-page coffee-table book…as 80 layered Photoshop files. As we say here in the South, “bless their little hearts, they just don’t know any better.” But that’s no reason to encourage it. So I see these new features in Photoshop CS6 as tantamount to handing a firecracker to a baby.

Printers, you can now look forward to proud clients bringing their sell sheets to you as ginormous Photoshop files, bragging that they’ve used styles. And then you can look forward to explaining to them why their text looks pixelated on the proof. That’s because, even though text is editable in Photoshop, it’s rendered as pixels, whether you output directly from Photoshop, or place the image into InDesign and image from there.

Without special handling, text and vector content in a Photoshop file is rendered in pixels during output. Not what you want on your business card!

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But wait—all is not lost!

While it’s better to handle text and vector content in Illustrator and InDesign, there IS a way to render vector content correctly from Photoshop.

The trick is to save the file as a Photoshop PDF.

• In the General options, check “Preserve Photoshop Editing Capabilities.”
• In the Compression options, choose “Do Not Resample,” and turn off compression.

The result is essentially your completely editable Photoshop file—layers, vectors, text and all—in a PDF wrapper. To other applications (such as Acrobat or InDesign), the file is a PDF. But if you reopen the PDF in Photoshop, nothing is lost—the original Photoshop file is there for you.

While vector and text edges are nice and crisp, effects such as bevel and emboss (or the ubiquitous drop shadow) can only be accomplished by pixels. Such content will take on the underlying resolution of the image.

Not-So-Smart Objects

When you place vector content from Illustrator into Photoshop, it’s automatically converted to a Smart Object, which allows you to perform endless transformations with a fresh start each time. So you’d think that Smart Objects would be rendered with vector edges, but they’re not: while the vector reference is stored within the Photoshop file, it only serves as a source for pixels. Even saving as a Photoshop PDF will not force Smart Object content to render as vectors. Counterintuitive, I know, but that’s the deal.

Here’s a comparison of the fate of vector content in PSDs and Photoshop PDFs (click to enlarge).

A comparison of the support for vector edges.

Now that you know how to maintain vector and text content in a Photoshop file, just promise me you’ll use it only for good, never for evil (by which I mean something like a 24-page catalog in 24 Photoshop files; that’s just wrong).

My Lynda.com title “Acrobat X: Creating Forms” is now available on DVD. Now you can watch it anywhere — great fun at parties!

Here’s the product information.

It’s an extensive course on creating interactive forms in Acrobat, with information on designing form artwork in Word, Illustrator, and InDesign, all the way to performing calculations in forms (so your users don’t have to). And it’s even funny in spots.

Remember when printing companies used to give out free tint sample books, showing combinations of cyan, magenta, and yellow so you could get an idea of what your CMYK combos might look? I haven’t seen one in a while, so I have created files so you can print your own. Of course, unless your printing device is carefully profiled, your output won’t necessarily match a commercial printer’s results. But if you print in-house, you may find them helpful. They show only combinations of C+M+Y —adding all the black combinations would result in over 400 pages, so I’m afraid you’ll have to imagine what adding 15%K might produce.

I’ve provided two versions:

Illustrator CS5 file: www.practicalia.net/tintblocks/ColorBlocksBy5.ai
Adobe PDF file: www.practicalia.net/tintblocks/ColorBlocksBy5.pdf

Hope you find them useful!

The forms auto-recognition feature in Acrobat X Pro is powerful and fast — it creates form fields based on elements in the PDF (such as lines, boxes, circles, etc.), and names them according to nearby text. While you often have to tweak the results  — for example, creating fields it missed, renaming fields with paragraph-long names — it can be a timesaver. So why wouldn’t you always use it?

Recently, I worked on a large project with lots of numbered fields, and that experience sort of sharpened my thinking about auto vs. manual. Because I needed short, concise field names on pages with tons of neighboring text, I decided that renaming would take as long as creating from scratch, with less chance of error. On pages like the one shown above, I could’ve created all 40 fields almost instantaneously by letting Acrobat auto-recognize them, but I elected to create them by using the Place Multiple Fields feature.

That probably sounds like the long way around, but there was a method to my madness. I’ve created two videos to explain.

In the video for Part I, I show how I created the fields using the Place Multiple Fields feature.

In the video for Part II, I show how Acrobat’s auto-recognition feature would’ve handled it. Yes, it’s much faster, and no, I didn’t do it the “long way around” for billing purposes
At the end of Part II, I explain how important the field naming conventions are, and why my method allows me to take advantage of that, whereas Acrobat’s approach messes that up.

Oh, and just so you know, creating this 40+-page interactive form is really fun — I love the mechanics of creating and refining forms (how twisted is that?)

If you’re a longtime user of Adobe products, you’re probably accustomed to using Command-Spacebar (PC: Control-Spacebar) to zoom in. It works in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and other apps.

But it seems (initially) to be broken in Acrobat X. Since you’re already traumatized by the radically-changed interface in Acrobat X, you may just assume that the old zoom shortcut is broken. You press Command+Spacebar, and nothing happens. You just figure, well, it was fun while it lasted.

All is not lost, however; you just have to use a bit of finesse. It’s a one-two punch: press and hold the Spacebar first, then — a half-second later — press and hold the Command or Control key. Voilá (which is French for “Zoom tool”), you can now click and zoom. It’s still the same combination of keys; you just have to press them in order (then hold) rather than simultaneously.

And no, I don’t know why. It’s one of those Great Mysteries.

If you haven’t already, download the 10.1 update for Acrobat X on the Mac. Now you can use the TouchUp Object tool to edit images and vector content. Have no idea why this was broken when Acrobat X shipped (see my earlier post here). But it’s all better now. You may commence to fixing all those problem PDFs your clients are sending you.

UPDATE: It’s finally been fixed! Download the 10.1 update and commence to TouchingUp.

Another reason to not uninstall your old software…

The Edit Object function (formerly TouchUp Object tool) is broken in the initial release of Acrobat X on the Mac. When you select an image or vector object, then right-click and choose Edit Object or Edit Image, it displays an error alert indicating that it can’t start the editing application.

No matter how hard you try to convince it to use Photoshop or Illustrator, it fails. Adobe is aware of the problem, but no date has been mentioned for a patch. Until this is fixed, you’ll have to use a previous version of Acrobat to do your repair work (if the original application file isn’t available), or use a PDF-editing application such as Enfocus PitStop.

Lucky Windows users — this doesn’t affect you. You can TouchUp to your little hearts’ content.

Adobe Systems has released the tenth version of the venerable Acrobat: Acrobat X (pronounced “ten,” not “ex”). Be prepared for culture shock: the interface is completely revamped. Not the “we moved some menu items around to keep you on your toes” you’ve seen in previous versions, but an utterly different environment. Like the “re-imagining” of recent Hollywood sequels, this one bears little resemblance to its ancestors.

As I explore more deeply, I’ll post more. But, for now, here’s how to find the full-fledged User Guide. From the Help menu, choose “Adobe Acrobat X Pro Help.” The Adobe Community Help application launches (as of CS5, the Help files appear in the Help application, not in your Web browser). Look for the PDF icon in the upper right corner of the interface, and click on “View Help PDF.” Once the PDF opens within the Help app, click the little floppy “save” icon to save the PDF to your hard drive.

Click the highlighted link to load the User Guide PDF, then save the file to your hard drive.

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 »