PDF’s and missing text

(TeKK) wrote in news:a647f4dd.0503170644.65a66075
@posting.google.com:

A couple of days ago I was producing my first piece of artwork for a professional newspaper and with no formal training the attempts were a case of hit or miss.

Well, that’s generally how it goes. At least you seem earnest in learning how to do it right. You’d be amazed at how rare that is.

All was going well until I got to the point of exporting as a PDF using Adobe Distiller

Hold up right there.

Photoshop can save a PDF natively. Adding Distiller will likely only cause you problems – as you can see. (More about this below).

and I came across a strange problem where blocks
of random text would vanish and there would be no indication of the text on the page at all. I tried several things to fix this but as I was using specific settings from the newspaper, I didn’t have much to go on.

Sounds like a bad font. What is it?

Browsing a few of the newsgroups I saw that this was a problem a while back yet I couldn’t find a good solution so I scratched my head about it for a while then it hit me.

I was designing the advert in CMYK since that would be how it is printed (another requirement of the newspaper)

A requirement of offset printing, period – at least until you get to the very high-end, which is fairly rare and quite expensive.

Don’t worry about that, though – no one is going to let you within five miles of a Hexachrome job without training.

and the shade of black
I was using was, according to the CMYK colour picker, closer to green (combo of yellow and cyan)

Then it wasn’t black.

Black is black (K). Sometimes you add some of the other inks to get a nice, deep black, but not in newsprint.

Printing on newsprint is a little like drawing on toilet paper with a Sharpie. The ink permeates the paper and the individual dots expand (thus the term "Dot Gain"). To compensate, you actually use a little LESS black – how much less depends on the paper. You should ask the newspaper about that.

At any rate, if you want black text in Photoshop, you need to make the text 100% K *and nothing else*. Photoshop’s default "black" is a mixture that prints very poorly on fine objects like small or serifed text. I’ll be happy to discuss why, but this message is already too long as it is.

<snip>

Just thought I’d post this since I know I struggled for a while and I’d be sure glad if there’d been a solution ^_^

For any pictures you’re using, you need to check the black levels in them. If they are more than about 90%, you should use the curves tool to pull them down.

Image I was working on was a 300DPI photoshop document made in Photoshop 7.0 on windows XP, distiller was version 5.0. acrobat reader was version 5.0

Okay – do this instead.

Save a copy of the Photoshop file in PDF. On the second dialog box, Select "Zip" under encoding (lossless compression). Also select "Include Vector Data" and "Use Outlines for Text."

This will keep the text nice and clean, but do away with any embedding problems.

Interesting reading, I’ll bear those things in mind next time!

I’ve been using photoshop since about 1998 but never on things like commercial printing and the difference in specifications has been quite the learning experience. All my work has been for web graphics, video game box art etc.

As for saving without distiller, according to the newspaper they’ll literally refuse to accept anything that hasn’t been produced using it. I don’t know if they’d notice a difference but I’ll give it a go.

In , TeKK wrote:

A couple of days ago I was producing my first piece of artwork for a professional newspaper and with no formal training the attempts were a case of hit or miss.

All was going well until I got to the point of exporting as a PDF using Adobe Distiller and I came across a strange problem where blocks of random text would vanish and there would be no indication of the text on the page at all. I tried several things to fix this but as I was using specific settings from the newspaper, I didn’t have much to go on.

What program were you using to make the PostScript you were distilling? Photoshop can make a PDF without using Distiller–but you should never design an ad for professional printing in Photoshop. Photoshop is not a page layout tool. Do your images in Photoshop, your logos in a vector program like Illustrator, and put the ad together and add your type in a page layout program like QuarkXPress or InDesign.

Browsing a few of the newsgroups I saw that this was a problem a while back yet I couldn’t find a good solution so I scratched my head about it for a while then it hit me.

I was designing the advert in CMYK since that would be how it is printed (another requirement of the newspaper) and the shade of black I was using was, according to the CMYK colour picker, closer to green (combo of yellow and cyan) than anything else. I found this bizarre and selected a different shade of black from the colour picker, this time closer to Cyan. The result in Photoshop was that the text looked surrounded by a bluish hint but on exporting using distiller, the text all appears and comes out fully black. Printed out it is spot on.

Black text should be ONLY black–0% Cyan, 0% Magenta, 0% Yellow, 100% Black. Otherwise, it may run on press fuzzy or with a "halo" around it because of misregistration.

It should also be set to overprint the colors underneath–part of the reason you should not set your text in Photoshop, but instead should use a page layout program.

Just thought I’d post this since I know I struggled for a while and I’d be sure glad if there’d been a solution ^_^

Image I was working on was a 300DPI photoshop document made in Photoshop 7.0 on windows XP, distiller was version 5.0. acrobat reader was version 5.0

If you intend to continue doing work for press, your life will be a lot easier, you will be a lot less frustrated, and your work will look a lot better if you buy and learn a page layout program.
—
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