PDF Research Get Prepress-Ready PDFs from QuarkXPress

Acrobat Distiller Smooths the PDF Process By Stephen Beale (June 1998 -- Macworld Magazine Column)   Acrobat, Adobe Systems' portable-document technology, was developed to put publications online. With Acrobat 3.0 ($295; 408/536-6000, www.adobe.com), Adobe reworked the Portable Document Format (PDF) to be suitable for prepress purposes too. The Acrobat files that perform on screen can now walk a tightrope to your service bureau. The PDF Advantage Most prepress production systems are based on PostScript, a page-description language that uses English-like commands to generate type, vector graphics, and bitmapped images. PDF uses the same underlying software as PostScript but has a more efficient structure that treats each page as a self-contained object instead of as a series of sequentially processed commands. PDF now offers several advantages over PostScript as a file format for printing: PDF files are typically more compact than their PostScript counterparts and less prone to output errors. You can soft-proof a PDF file by opening it in Adobe's free Acrobat Reader. You can make minor text edits to a PDF file with Acrobat Exchange, which is part of the Acrobat 3.0 package. Once you've converted a PostScript file to PDF, you can print the file with Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Exchange. At this point, the file gets converted back to PostScript, but it's generally a cleaner PostScript file--smaller and easier to print--than what you began with. (PostScript 3 printers, which are beginning to appear now, can process PDF files directly.) PDF Pitfalls Here's the rub: the Acrobat technology and PDF come from Adobe, but the most-popular professional page-layout software comes from archrival Quark. You can produce PDFs from QuarkXPress 3.X and 4.0, but it's tricky. And Quark's manual doesn't help. Quark is developing a PDF export filter for XPress, but for now, you're on your own. There are three options for producing PDF files from XPress, but only one--Acrobat Distiller (part of Acrobat 3.0)--creates PDFs suitable for production printing. The others--Adobe's PDFWriter (a QuickDraw driver included in Acrobat 3.0) and Apple's LaserWriter 8.5 drivers--are designed to produce PDFs for online posting or electronic exchange. Another PDFWriter drawback is that it won't print EPS files. Do the PDF Two-Step Getting PDFs from XPress is a two-step process: use the Mac's PostScript printer driver to convert the file to a PostScript print file, then use Distiller to convert the PostScript file to PDF. The tricky part is figuring out which settings to use. Distiller's defaults prepare files for online viewing. For print jobs, you want to produce a generic PDF file that works with a multitude of output devices (see "Distilling the Two-Part PDF Process"). Before preparing a PDF file, you should discuss your project with the technicians at your service bureau. They can suggest ways to optimize your file for their workflow, software, and prepress equipment. After all, you don't want Acrobat to tumble into the net as it walks the prepress tightrope. Distilling the Two-Part PDF Process Distiller's default settings can have disastrous results for most print jobs. The settings described below will give you a generic PDF file that should work for most color prepress jobs. To get the best results, check with your service bureau for more specific settings. Part 1: Create a PostScript Print File In the Chooser, select the PSPrinter driver. You should use Adobe's PSPrinter 8.3.1, which you can download from Adobe's Web site. (To see which PSPrinter-driver version you have, open the Extensions folder inside your System Folder, click on PSPrinter, and press command-I.) Apple's LaserWriter driver also produces PostScript print files, but it's more complicated and requires being connected to a PostScript printer. Select Virtual Printer in the Printer Type pop-up. Then click on Setup, and choose Acrobat Distiller as your PPD. If you're running QuarkXPress 3.32, you must remove the Balloon Help file from the QuarkXPress folder. PSPrinter 8.3.1 conflicts with balloon help and will crash your system when you try to print. Now you're ready to define print settings. The process is a bit different in versions 3.X and 4.0. QuarkXPress 3.3 Open the Page Setup dialog box, and make sure Acrobat Distiller is selected in the Printer Type pop-up. Set Resolution to 2,400 dpi or higher; set Halftone Screen to 200 lpi or higher. Select Use PDFScreen Values. (In QuarkXPress 3.X, PDF refers to printer description files, not the Portable Document Format.) Open the Print dialog box, and choose File as the destination. Make sure Print Colors as Grays is deselected or else your colors won't print. Then click on Save. QuarkXPress 4.0 Open the Print dialog box. Click on the Setup tab, and make sure the Distiller PPD is selected for Printer Description. Click on the Output tab. Print Colors should be set to Composite Color, and Halftoning should be set to Printer. Click on the Printer button at the bottom of the screen. This brings up the Virtual Printer dialog box. Choose File as the destination, and click on Save. In both versions of XPress, clicking on Save brings up a dialog box for saving the PostScript file to disk. Name the file; choose PostScript Job as the format and PostScript Level 2 Only for compatibility. In the Font Embedding pop-up, you should generally select All to ensure that all fonts in the document are embedded in the file. The All but Standard 13 and All but Standard 35 options will also work and produce a smaller PostScript file. But if your document includes one of the standard 13 or 35 fonts and those fonts are not available at your service bureau (an admittedly unlikely occurrence), these options will cause a font-substitution error. Choosing Binary as the data format makes for smaller files. Part 2: Create a PDF File from Distiller 1. From the Finder, open the Acrobat 3.0 folder and locate the Xtras folder. Inside you'll find a folder called High_end. Open that folder, and drag the Prologue.ps and Epilogue.ps files into the folder in which the Distiller application resides. (Note: Acrobat retains job settings. After you follow these instructions once, you can go directly to step 3 to create subsequent print PDFs.) 2 Open Distiller, go to the Distiller menu, and select Job Options. A dialog box with four tabs appears. Each tab of the dialog box contains several settings. Knowing which boxes to check is essential to getting a PDF that's suitable for production printing. General A. Select Acrobat 3.0 compatibility. Acrobat 2.1 lacks the prepress features of version 3.0. Compression A. Select Compress Text and Line Art. B. Deselect all downsampling and JPEG compression options, unless you want the images in your document to be converted to JPEG (generally not a good idea for prepress production). C. Select Zip Manual Compression of color and gray-scale images. These compression settings reduce the file size without affecting image quality. Font Embedding A. Select the Embed All Fonts option to store all fonts used in the document within the PDF file. B. Select the Subset Fonts Below option to save file space by limiting the number of whole fonts Distiller embeds. Under the default, if less than 35 percent of the characters are in Bembo, for example, Distiller embeds just the subset of Bembo characters actually used. If more than 35 percent of the characters are in Bembo, Distiller embeds the entire font. Note: Subsetting fonts may limit your service bureau's ability to edit your file. Advanced A. Select the Distill with prologue.ps/epilogue.ps option to force Distiller to include both files in the PDF file. (If the PDF doesn't include those files, Distiller may sometimes convert spot colors in QuarkXPress files to their process-color equivalents.) B. Deselect the Convert CMYK Images to RGB option. C. Select Preserve OPI Comments, Preserve Overprint settings, Preserve Halftone Screen Information, Preserve Transfer Functions, and Preserve Under Color Removal/Black Generation. These settings let you retain the prepress options you selected in the original QuarkXPress document. D. Set Color Conversion to Unchanged or Device Independent. Either option will preserve standard color spaces specified in your QuarkXPress document. 3. Now you're ready to convert the PostScript file to PDF. From Distiller's File menu, open the PostScript print file you just created.You will then be prompted to enter a file name for the PDF file; the default appends a .pdf extension to the original file name. Click onSave, and Distiller goes to work. 4. After Distiller saves the file, you should open it in Acrobat Viewer to make sure it was processed correctly. Return to PDF Research Companion home page. a production of Performance Graphics ©1998 The Miller De Wulf Corporation