HELP ME PLEASE!

[Fingers]

Hi All,

It's ten past nine in the evening and I've had to leave my office and come home else my wife will hurt me.

I have ten roller banners to print overnight that are being collected at 11am in the morning. Artwork is a ten page pdf, created from Indesign. If you can picture this - the background is tinted to a newsprint sort of colour. In the foreground are the logos of a number of UK newspapers, and a single sentence of black text. The logos and text vary on each.

The first page printed correctly.

The second page was correct EXCEPT the black text was white. It's as if the black text is left out for printing later.

I'm guessing this is something to do with overprint settings within the pdf, and the RIP's handling of those.

I have remote access to the RIP.

Your challenge, should you decide to accept it - and I hope one of the experts on here can talk me through it - is to tell me what's wrong so I can fix it remotely and set the machine printing. The risk - if the fix doesn't work I won't know until the morning, as I can't see the printer. (By which point 9 roller banners worth of media will be wasted and I'll be out of time.) No pressure!

If anyone can help me I would be incredibly grateful!

Thanks
Craig

[oss_flatbed]

just curious did u make the deadline ?

[Fingers]

yes we did - but never resolved why problem was happening.

Work around was a tedious old standard. Split multiple page pdf into individual pages, rasterise each in Photoshop. Print from flattened tifs...

Every time I resolve a problem with pdf output, another couple pop up somewhere else. On a high today though as just found a lovely work around for outlining mac fonts within acrobat so that I can edit in PC Illustrator where I don't have correct fonts installed. That one had been bugging me for ages!

[Scott]

Fingers Wrote:On a high today though as just found a lovely work around for outlining mac fonts within acrobat so that I can edit in PC Illustrator where I don't have correct fonts installed. That one had been bugging me for ages!

Feel free to share your workaround. There are a couple ways I know of, which are hit and miss it seems, but one of the best investments is a little Acrobat plugin called IntelliPDF Curves. It will detect all the fonts and convert them to curves (outline) and save a copy of the file. I can't tell you how many hours it has saved me.

http://intellipdf.com/curves.htm

PS: Sorry I wasn't able to jump in on the first post. I'll have to inquire about what was happening and see if it's been reported at all with other people.

[Fingers]

Hi - assumed work around was off topic so didn't post it.

To convert fonts to outlines within acrobat to enable editing where font isn't available....

go to document/watermark/add
type anything you like in the text field, but IMPORTANT set the opacity to 0% so it doesn't actually display in your file.
hit OK.

go to advanced/print production/flattener preview/
i use the high res preset, with the raster/vector balance set to max vector
check the "text to outlines" box.....
hit apply
hit ok
save as new file.

there are probably unforeseen complications with this method, but if so, they're unforeseen.

[Scott]

Fingers Wrote:Hi - assumed work around was off topic so didn't post it.

To convert fonts to outlines within acrobat to enable editing where font isn't available....

go to document/watermark/add
type anything you like in the text field, but IMPORTANT set the opacity to 0% so it doesn't actually display in your file.
hit OK.

go to advanced/print production/flattener preview/
i use the high res preset, with the raster/vector balance set to max vector
check the "text to outlines" box.....
hit apply
hit ok
save as new file.

there are probably unforeseen complications with this method, but if so, they're unforeseen.

I've been contemplating putting a section or something with Tips & Tricks as it would be nice to gather a user populated database of various things we do to make our jobs go smoother. I'm all about sharing and hoping that maybe something that caused me alot of headaches but figured out will save someone else some in the future.

Thanks!

[darkcloud]

I think that's a great idea. From what I can tell, this business is all about finding workarounds.

[bellevuefineart]

Personally, I've had terrible luck printing pdf files with Onyx. First of all, the RIP takes forever, and I mean hours. Then there are color issues that you wouldn't normally expect. I have some wedding photographers that would love to give me pdf files generated with in design, but i've never figured out the color issues so I insist on TIF files.

[virtu]

I also had an PDF file, very simple file. The layout was a picture and above the picture there was a red color with black and white text. Only CMYK colors.
I opened the PDF in Preflight and then some text that should be black was shown as white. Didnt see that and the print failed.

Look into Quickset told me that Spotcolor replacement was enabled. Disabling Spotcolor replacement made the file rip correctly.
Maybe you have a look at the file again.

virtu

[darkcloud]

This may not help on files provided from other people, but we found the cause for that behavior and it is indeed a problem with spot colors. We use Corel X3 here, and when you publish to pdf, you have to go into the options and select "convert spot colors to process". That fixes that problem completely. We now use pdf's 90% of the time in house and I have no problem except in the instance where there is a color gradient in the art. The way I found to work around that problem was to open the file in Acrobat reader and print it directly from Acrobat using the Onyx virtual printer. You have to make sure your print settings in Acrobat are correct and set the page size in the printer options, but it works great for trouble files.