[softwarelist] Printing from PDF files

A recent experience of mine may be of interest to anyone planning to create a
PDF file for subsequent commercial printing involving the use of Acrobat to
render it.

I created (in Ovation Pro) a double-sided A4 leaflet, mostly text (all fonts
-Type 1 where available - embedded), but with three B&W graphics, one sprite,
one Draw file, one JPEG. This was converted to PDF (v. 1.4) with !PrintPDF and
Ghostscript 8.53. Conversion was straightforward, and the resulting PDF
rendered OK *on screen* in !GView (v. 1.51), !PDF (v. 3.00.1.17), !RiScript
(v. 5.02) in RISCOS, and also in Acrobat7 with Windows XP. The file
printed OK from !PDF and !RiScript, but from Acrobat7 the sprite printed with
*B&W inverted, and some grey regions in the new white area*. All printing was
on the same HP1100 laser printer (I have a RISCube machine with Virtual RPC
Adjust, using UniPrint/!Printers for the RISCOS side, and the WinXP printer
driver for the PC side).

Since I hope to have the file printed by a local firm using PC's with
Acrobat, this was an unexpected problem, which would not have shown up had I
not had Acrobat7/WindowsXP at hand to try it out. Investigation showed that
the sprite was an old 4bpp version: knowing the problems with low resolution
sprites and !Printers, I changed it to 24bpp, and to JPEG (to reduce size).
The new PDF file made after this change printed perfectly from Acrobat7, as
well as being some 100k smaller than the old one.

Moral: unless/until someone can sort out the problems of !Printers with low
res. sprites, be extra sure to check all old sprites are PDF friendly!


-- 
Denys Wells

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