Quark Forums

 Hi all,

 This problem has occurred a few times recently.

We receive pdf adverts which get placed with in a Quark pages, usually with no problem.

However when proofing them as a pdf some of the adverts have rough/bitmap style text.

Tried with various settings with no luck.

Have tried in Quark 7.5 and 8.1 exactly the same.

Annoyingly it works fine in Indesign.

Creating an eps of the pdf also works (kind of) 

It appears to be a new problem (to us anyway)

Any ideas

Cheers

Mac 10.4.11

GreatWhite:

Annoyingly it works fine in Indesign.

Creating an eps of the pdf also works (kind of) 

It appears to be a new problem (to us anyway)

Any ideas

Its not a new problem, quark and placed pdfs have been going wrong since version 4.

what do you mean by "Creating an eps of the pdf also works (kind of)"

If you squint at the screen the problem goes away, sorry its not a proper fix 

You could try optimizing the PDF to PDFX1a before placing into quark which sometimes works but Save As EPS usually has a higher chance of of success.

 Yeah tried the squinting route, but just wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

 Since my post I have also discovered the Save as Adobe Pdf Optimizing and basically re-fry the pdf.

 This seems to of done the trick touch wood!

 "what do you mean by "Creating an eps of the pdf also works (kind of)"

 Just that I have noticed a slight difference occasionally.

Thanks for the tip on optimizing  and thanks for the response Glen

Right under Save As Optimized PDF will be Save As EPS. Choose that. Click on Options and set your options for the EPS file, including a TIF preview AND make sure you check embed fonts (it's a popup menu). Historically, XPress has handle EPS far better than PDF. That's because XPress simply hands off the EPS code to your print device. With PDF XPress internalizes the postscript code and handles the printing itself. Again, historically it's not too good at that. Later versions have gotten progressively better at it, but as your experience shows it's not completely there yet. ID is the other way around. It handles PDF much better than it does EPS.

 If you still get issues with the EPS then most likely the colorspace is wrong (RGB black instead of grayscale, etc) or the client did not embed fonts or both. I've had so many issues with client ads that anything I get I run through Pitstop and QABOT and save out EPS's We don't place PDFs unless we have/need to. 

 Nice one Erik on the ball as usual.

 Especially like the technical reasons why.

 Historically for some reason we have always resisted the eps route.

 Silly really as everyone seems to do it.

 Some how we have always got by.

 Maybe its time to change

 Thanks for taking the time to respond

 Cheers

You can thank Robert Zacherl for the technical reasons. There were some long running discussions on this back when QXP 6.x was in it's midlife. Lots of people seem to resist EPS for some reason, but I've always found it to be a good versatile format. I always did this because in my first job we got PDFs from AdSend and the only way to get the file in to XPress 4 at the time was to save out in a format it could import – which with Acrobat Exchange (what we were using at the time) was EPS. So for me, that just kind of stuck. The benefits of this just reinforced things for me later. The general consensus here tends to be saving out an EPS from PDF. Particularly if the PDF is giving you problems.

 In any case I hope it works for you. Sometimes it doesn't, but I usually find that that's because I got a PDF generated from a POS Microsoft Word file where the customer used every font under the sun, crammed it all in there and then exported as RGB black and didn't embed fonts. That's where Pitstop comes in!