Quark Forums

This is advice I need for printing a book on demand at Viovio. Any help will be appreciated. This is the first time I'll be saving to PDF with QuarkXPress 8, and find that it's different than QuarkXPress 6. When with QuarkXPress 6, I was not to check save Subset Fonts. Now I no longer get that option. What I get is the following. What choice should I make here? Also, under the Export as PDF Style menu I have the following options. Which if any should I choose? Captured Settings Default PDF Output Style PDF/X-1a:2001 PDF/X-3:2002 Press - High Quality/High Resolution Print - Medium Quality/ Medium Resolution Screen - Low Quality/Low Resolution Screen - Medium Quality/Low Resolution Thanks again.

Hello Frank,

While Exporting to PDF the "Select All" Option should be selected under the Fonts submenu.

Also to choose among the PDF styles it depends on the work flow :

If you need the PDF/X-1A verification you can choose the corresponding style PDF/X-1a:2001

If you need high resolution PDF for high quality printing you can choose the  High Quality/High Resolution Print style

If you would wish to send the PDF through email you can choose Screen - Medium Quality/Low Resolution  style.

So it depends on what quality PDF is required thus the corresponding style can be selected to get the desired output. 

I hope this information proves helpful.

Navpreet, thanks for the quick reply. Although Most of it is beyond my comprehension I should get by with the info you furnished. 1. How can I tell if I need a PDF/X-1A verification, if I don't know what it is? 2. The book Im having printed is fairly good quality so I guess I need a high resolution PDF. 3. I'll try asking the printer if the high resolution is important, With Quark 6 There were none of these options. Unfortunately Quark 8 won't allow me to reopen the book in Quark 6. Will try to keep you posted on the results. Thanks again.

 Frank. If the printer hasn't asked for a PDF/X-1A then a High Quality PDF is probably good enough. PDF/X-1A is an industry standard for 4 color printing. All elements that are to be PDFed must either be grayscale, 4 color or spot color and depending on settings will be PDFed in to the colorspace it's set for (for example, US Web Coated (SWOP) v2). If you have any element that has an RGB black or RGB color it fails that standard and thus will fail to be PDFed. High Quality PDFs simply allow for higher resolution, but do no checking for color spaces (although it will probably convert your elements to the destination color space).

BTW, PDF/X-3 is the inverse of PDF/X-1A. It allows only RGB or web color spaces. Later considerations result in an update of the standard. PDF/X-1A has a 2001 standard and a later version (of which I do not recall at this time). Also, if you CHANGE any of the PDF/X standards to something else you must realize that you won't be getting a PDF/X PDF because it no longer adheres to that standard.

Hope that helps...

http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/pdfx-1a

http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/pdfx-3

http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/pdfx-4

1a is the most difficult to get wrong 

Eric you may want to Edit the bit about only RGB  

Glenn McDowall:

Eric you may want to Edit the bit about only RGB  

 

Glenn, you are probably right. I was writing that at the kitchen table while I was eating dinner so my normal (in)attention to detail was lacking. 

I guess I should say that RGB is allowed in PDF/X-3, which also includes grayscale, CMYK and spot. Here's a link: http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/pdfx-3

I suffer from a severe case of "I don't know what the heck I'm talking about!" Sorry if I misled anyone....

At least your links work

Yeah. Now if my brain would work then we'd all be ok.

eyoungren, I have an additional question that you may be able to answer. After uploading my PDF pages to my On Demand Printer I get a message that my PDFs were not created with the latest software and a printing problem may result. In the past the error was that my fonts were substituted with courier that was all jumbled up and unreadable. For the few times that I create PDFs I really can't afford to buy the full Acrobat. The printer wants either PDF files or JPEGs. The JPEGs wouldn't give me the nice sharp black type that I get with Quark documents. If I choose embed fonts in creating my PDFs, doesn't that embed all the necessary fonts for that job? I only use 3 fonts in my books. How would I embed the entire font family when it consists of 12 weights (styles) like thin, narrow, condensed, etc. which I don't use. I don't even use option characters like accents. Can you shed some light on this? Thanks They ask for PDF 1.6 and that 1.4 and 1.5 may not work properly. This is from their specs: 1)Aways Embed fonts - if your pdf has text, Always embed the full font family. If at all possible, DO NOT SUBSET FONTS If a font is multiply subsetted in a pdf, when presented to the rip, can produce garbled text. The RIP seems to try to build a single font resource for a multiply subsetted font. But since that font has multiple definitions in the pdf, the font resource that the rip builds can be at the very least garbled from being overwritten over and over again. Furthur, The RIP might reject the font resource entirely, and end up substituting Courier instead. This Usually produces expanded text, reflowing due to expanded kerning. If a pdf file is built from multiple other pdf files, and fonts are subsetted in those individual files, then when they are combined, the final PDF file will have multiply subsetted fonts, which can produce this issue. So, if you fully embed, and never subset, there will be one and only one font definition in your final file.

 What they are meaning by embedding all fonts:

Note that this is an Acrobat Distiller setting and that subset fonts is not checked (ignore the font list you see here for embedding, it's just my setting). I'm not familiar with the On Demand Printer so I don't know what settings you can control on that, but this is in general what you are trying to achieve.

Note also, that you don't necessarily need Acrobat to make a PDF. There are a number of third party apps/virtual printers available for Mac and PC that can do the job. Some are shareware, but there are a few that are open source (and therefore freeware).

 

Erik, thanks for your patience and help. I noticed that my initial post included Quark's version of PDF embeded fonts listing. Last year I checked subset fonts, not knowing what that was, which apparently caused the problem. So far the printer has checked my book and corrected something about a template which they corrected, and that the book should print ok. They didn't mention anything about the fonts so I guess they're ok. Again, thanks. Will post back when I get my book. By the way, all the free and free trial PDF software are for PCs, couldn't find any for mac.

 Frank. I'm glad I could help, though frankly Glenn is much, much more knowledgeable about PDFs and prepress than I am. Glenn works in prepress, I'm just a Graphic Designer who knows what I need to know to get jobs out. In any case, for OSX you have Ghostscript which is open source. Here is a link to a GUI app I found on Versiontracker that will allow you to control Ghostscript.

I have no idea if it's any good, but it has 5 stars in the user ratings...

Here also is the link I used for look for these things on Versiontracker.

I hope something here helps you out.

EDIT: I might also just add here that looking back at my screen shot, this would also be the place to embed fonts that aren't used in the document. In the left pane you would just select all the fonts you intend to embed in the PDF and then transfer them to the Always Embed side. This is of course if you happen to be using Acrobat Distiller to create your PDFs. I'm not sure of the settings using XPress (I usually save out a PS file and Distill) and I've not used any 3rd party solutions such as Ghostscript.

Finally, I would say that the OS itself offers three different ways to make a PDF. Both Preview and the Colorsync Utility will take a PS file and make a PDF out of it. And you can use the PDF button inside the system itself when printing. All of these options use the Quartz filter. I would NEVER recommend these PDFs for print however as I don't believe Apple intended any PDF created this way to be used for print jobs therefore the quality is not up to that spec.

eyoungren:

frankly Glenn is much, much more knowledgeable about PDFs and prepress than I am

Erik is too modest, he knows lots that I don't.

frank:

They ask for PDF 1.6 and that 1.4 and 1.5 may not work properly. This is from their specs: 1)Aways Embed fonts - if your pdf has text, Always embed the full font family. If at all possible, DO NOT SUBSET FONTS If a font is multiply subsetted in a pdf, when presented to the rip, can produce garbled text. The RIP seems to try to build a single font resource for a multiply subsetted font. But since that font has multiple definitions in the pdf, the font resource that the rip builds can be at the very least garbled from being overwritten over and over again. Furthur, The RIP might reject the font resource entirely, and end up substituting Courier instead. This Usually produces expanded text, reflowing due to expanded kerning. If a pdf file is built from multiple other pdf files, and fonts are subsetted in those individual files, then when they are combined, the final PDF file will have multiply subsetted fonts, which can produce this issue. So, if you fully embed, and never subset, there will be one and only one font definition in your final file.

This is covering themselves.

If A single font is embedded as a subset, multiple times in PDF(1), and the same font is embedded as a subset mutiple times in PDF(2), it is possible for an application to combine these PDFs to make PDF(3) and use only one of the individual subset of that font.

A subset of a font in a pdf is just the characters required rather than the whole megabyte bloaty font.

When an application creates a subset font in a pdf it is supposed to give it a random prefix 8characters long so what is in the PDF looks a bit like ZXCDEGTH-Courier instead of Courier (i forget the correct syntax and it might be a suffix so don't qoute me on this bit) so as long as the 8 characters are different you shouldn't have any problems, thats the theory but if the Application ignores the random bit or it wasn't truly random and you had the same prefix then bam you lose half the characters.

 

Things to avoid:
Using Acrobat to merge, insert or replace pages, in particular PDFs pages created with Distiller 7 being merged, inserted or replaced in Acrobat 5.
Attempting typos using Acrobat Professional's TouchUp tool.

Placing EPS files with embedded fonts into InDesign 2 or InDesignCS and then Exporting to PDF. 

Merging PDFs created in one version of InDesign by placing and Exporting in another.

Using SaveAs or PDFOptimizer in Versions of Acrobat earlier than 9. 

 

If you can fully embed all fonts in all files, rather than subset them all of this can be avoided, unless you PDF Optimize them out, I can't find a setting option in Quark8 (JAWS) that allows you to choose between subset or not, so without Distiller you are a bit stuck.

However this subset replacement is incredibly rare, I've only ever seen it in PDFs produced by mixing InDesign versions. The fact that your printer is aware of it would probably indicate that they won't do anything with your PDF file to cause it.

High end Imposition programs use entirely different routines to combine PDF pages compared to Acrobat or placing them in a DTP app, which is why this shouldn't happen at the printers. Can you ask for an imposed proof?

 

Glenn McDowall:

eyoungren:

frankly Glenn is much, much more knowledgeable about PDFs and prepress than I am

Erik is too modest, he knows lots that I don't.

Glenn. You have just proven my previous statement with the concise knowledge you posted above, despite your statement of me being too modest. You and Robert Zacherl (wherever he went off too) are the PDF gods here!

I'm not fit to be Robert Zacherl's padwan. (do you remember the obi wan kenobi post?)

In fact most of what I've picked up on these forums is down to Robert, he is still an occasional poster on the Pitstop forum, but very much missed here. Matthais should head up the road in Hamburg and ply him with beer until he agrees to come back.

As for my knowledge of PDFs I'm afraid its less godlike and more like in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king, head over to Adobe PDF forum there are plenty there who are way advanced of me. In fact when I have to use Acrobat9 Pro and Pitstop8 I'm as baffled by the interfaces as the next man.

I'd love to figure out how to extract a separation, apparently it can be done without re-frying with v9.

Darth Almaink?