Adobe’s Era Publishing Habits……

On 30 Aug 2005 02:01:42 -0700, "Mohamed Al-Dabbagh" wrote:

Hi All!

I think many designers all over the world have started to convert to the weird habits brought to them by Adobe. From the moment I started using InDesign along with Photoshop and Illustrator (CS), I started to feel rather lazy by not pushing myself toward the past compulsory act of saving EPS’s. I wasn’t swallowing the fact of directly placing a JPEG image without converting it to an EPS (watertight) clone. Most unbelievably, to place a Photoshop native (CMYK) format with all transparency it has inside an art prepared for publishing. Now, even Illustrator accepts to swallow a Photoshop native format with all transparency, and InDesign will in turn swallow the final Illustrator native format that contained the original Photoshop art, (though I notice some bugs when I place gradients created in CMYK space in Illustrator, when I try placing the art inside InDesign).
Do you notice that it is a wholly brand new culture in desktop publishing? I started to use Acrobat PDF format (single file) generated by InDesign to ship my final prepress work to color separation shop, WITHOUT shipping my fonts, placed (vector) arts and dozens of (image) files generated by packing procedure.

I hope fellows here report any bugs they noticed by following this relentless new set of habits in publishing.

personally, i believe its called progress.

Mohamed Al-Dabbagh asked:

What are the precautions taken when abandon our old
(watertight) habits of desktop publishing?

Pre-flight and / or certify the .pdf.

William

"William F. Adams" wrote:

Mohamed Al-Dabbagh asked:

What are the precautions taken when abandon our old
(watertight) habits of desktop publishing?

Pre-flight and / or certify the .pdf.

William

Since you mention that, Certified PDF…….how come I have my doubts about that. You get some errors, no clue what to do to get rid of those errors (except for missing fonts but that is clear while Distilling), send the PDF over and
everything is OK………I have this feeling it is a lot of pooha but no bread.
—
steg

“steggy” said:

Since you mention that, Certified PDF…….how come I have my doubts about that. You get some errors, no clue what to do to get rid of those errors (except for missing fonts but that is clear while Distilling), send the PDF over and
everything is OK………I have this feeling it is a lot of pooha but no bread.

I don’t mean to be harsh, but….

Your ignorance is showing.

If you don’t know how to fix the errors, how can you expect to have confidence in knowing what it means for there to be no errors in certification?

I believe that once you’ve come to an understanding of the meaning and significance of errors in certification and pre-flighting and learn enough to be able to fix them you’ll then have confidence in the pre-flight and certification process.

Remember. Opinions are like buttocks, only those which are well-formed should be shown in public.

William

O, sweet William!

"William F. Adams" wrote in message

Remember. Opinions are like buttocks, only those which are well-formed should be shown in public.

William

I am SO stealing that!!! Can we send it to the White House, too?

steggy wrote:

Since you mention that, Certified PDF…….how come I have my doubts about that. You get some errors, no clue what to do to get rid of those errors (except for missing fonts but that is clear while Distilling),

Some are cryptic but all are important to understand, at least superficially. This is part of the knowledge base a professional needs to build up to work effectively in the new era.

Some are important because they are real problems you have to fix, and others are important because they aren’t real problems TO YOU so you don’t need to fix them OR CHECK FOR THEM.

Over and over I see people posting "I get this error in pre-flighting, how do I fix it" when the report is telling them something that isn’t a problem to them; but they don’t understand that the pre-flight rules are what they set up to pick up their own problems, not to create them.
—————————————-
Aandi Inston
Please support usenet! Post replies and follow-ups, don’t e-mail them.

Aandi Inston wrote:

steggy wrote:

Since you mention that, Certified PDF…….how come I have my doubts about that. You get some errors, no clue what to do to get rid of those errors (except for missing fonts but that is clear while Distilling),

Some are cryptic but all are important to understand, at least superficially. This is part of the knowledge base a professional needs to build up to work effectively in the new era.

Some are important because they are real problems you have to fix, and others are important because they aren’t real problems TO YOU so you don’t need to fix them OR CHECK FOR THEM.

Over and over I see people posting "I get this error in pre-flighting, how do I fix it" when the report is telling them something that isn’t a problem to them; but they don’t understand that the pre-flight rules are what they set up to pick up their own problems, not to create them.

I am well aware of the fact that software does what is good in: report problems, whether they are really something to be worried about ot not. I also recognize a lot of the errors and caution messages as being not of any importance.
I do understand when it gives me the message that there are spot colors where they should not be. Well they just are not there in my original!

But I also get a lot of messages that I just not understand. I have been working in pre press for 20 years, and I still am. But these messages do not relate to the terminology I know. And that is my problem. It might be a lingo thing, since I am Dutch, but I doubt that, having lived and worked in the USA for several years and using Acrobat Pro in the Dutch version. And the Preflight of Acrobat Pro gives me the same problems.

Also it amazes me when I get the firm demand from a magazine to send our ad as a Certified PDF (or else you will be
lynched after torture), and I send it as a non certified regular PDF, and I receive a thank you email telling me
everything went well with my Certified PDF………That
makes me sceptical, but at the same time they shift
responsibility completely to the sender of the PDF. They can not change the file, now can they, so everything that goes wrong is to blame on the sender.

I guess it is just the fact that I cannot understand the working of Enfocus Pitstop. I read a lot about it, but I cannot grab it.
And that, not for you Aandi but for the other poster, that is one of the reasons I also visit usenet. Not just to give advice, but also to learn. There are no dumb questions in my world, just silly answers. Step of your arrogant soap box or go and do something else instead of ruining your keyboard.

—
steg
**BTW" my sympathy to the people of Mississippi and Alabama**

"Mohamed Al-Dabbagh" wrote in
news::

I hope fellows here report any bugs they noticed by following this relentless new set of habits in publishing. What should we do and what should we don’t? What are the precautions taken when abandon our old (watertight) habits of desktop publishing?

I don’t see what you’re getting at.

I had plenty of "artists" ship ads and publications to me with placed JPEGs, embedded instead of linked graphics, no fonts, and no proofing hardcopy long before the era of PDF.

And PDF hardly means you cannot do small-scale correction work to files – large scale, yes. I’d rather the only people doing the large-scale work are the originating artists – not me, and not the people I send my files to.

steggy wrote:

snippage

But I also get a lot of messages that I just not understand.

more snippage

How about an example of one of these errors?

Most of the errors I’ve seen are pretty straightforward.

The rules for PDF1a.

Don’t use RGB
Embed all the fonts completely
Turn off OPI.

If you do that what fails?

<rant>

Perhaps you think you didn’t use RGB but it was defined as a color in the color pallet of some graphic you got off the internet from some guy in Nigeria in return for giving him your checking account number and your mothers’ maiden name.

You still have to go open that graphic and fix that color or use the ink manager or some other tool to deal with it.

I’m not even sure if OPI makes PDFX1a fail. But you should become aware of how to turn it on and off when placing graphics in programs that link to graphics as opposed to programs that only embed.

Embed all the fonts. It’s that simple. Do not subset any fonts. It’s that simple. Do you know where your fonts come from? I want to shoot the next f—ing designer who sends me the font installer for the font they purchased. If you can’t embed it, don’t use it. There’s a billion fonts out there. I mean c’mon. Is it that serif on the lower case i that just gets you so worked up that you HAVE TO HAVE that font?

</rant>

Eric Gill wrote:

"Mohamed Al-Dabbagh" wrote in
news::

I hope fellows here report any bugs they noticed by following this relentless new set of habits in publishing. What should we do and what should we don’t? What are the precautions taken when abandon our old (watertight) habits of desktop publishing?

I don’t see what you’re getting at.

I had plenty of "artists" ship ads and publications to me with placed JPEGs, embedded instead of linked graphics, no fonts, and no proofing hardcopy long before the era of PDF.

Totally true

And PDF hardly means you cannot do small-scale correction work to files – large scale, yes. I’d rather the only people doing the large-scale work are the originating artists – not me, and not the people I send my files to.

But that is a concern. Certified PDF is sacred now, and how can I check whether some pre press person at the printing office conveniently changes anything or not? The one who delivers the cPDF is totally responsible. I know that was not different from the time we delivered open files. But now they are "officially" closed files, so the proof of who did what is totally on the table of the designer. Open up a PDF in Illustrator and you can mess up a lot.
—
steg

Lee Blevins wrote:

steggy wrote:

snippage

But I also get a lot of messages that I just not understand.

more snippage

How about an example of one of these errors?

Most of the errors I’ve seen are pretty straightforward.
The rules for PDF1a.

Don’t use RGB
Embed all the fonts completely
Turn off OPI.

If you do that what fails?

<rant>

Perhaps you think you didn’t use RGB but it was defined as a color in the color pallet of some graphic you got off the internet from some guy in Nigeria in return for giving him your checking account number and your mothers’ maiden name.

You still have to go open that graphic and fix that color or use the ink manager or some other tool to deal with it.

I’m not even sure if OPI makes PDFX1a fail. But you should become aware of how to turn it on and off when placing graphics in programs that link to graphics as opposed to programs that only embed.

Embed all the fonts. It’s that simple. Do not subset any fonts. It’s that simple. Do you know where your fonts come from? I want to shoot the next f—ing designer who sends me the font installer for the font they purchased. If you can’t embed it, don’t use it. There’s a billion fonts out there. I mean c’mon. Is it that serif on the lower case i that just gets you so worked up that you HAVE TO HAVE that font?

</rant>

I will give you some messages soon. Messages that do not mean anything to me or anyone around me.

Your rant. No way. I (we) know exactly what we are doing and a mix up between RGB and CMYK is out of the question.
Nigerians land in the spam box. Internet pics are out of the question. We use stock photo’s, or photo’s and slides
delivered by the client, if needed scanned by us. All fonts are embedded. All fonts are OK. We take care of that, they are legal fonts, we buy them from the company that sells them, mostly Adobe.

One example from today. Not Pitstop, but making a PDF and using Acrobat Pro for Preflight.
An addie. Red background, converted to CMYK. Three small images, scans of covers of the magazine the ad is about. Text. Simple! 1/4 of a page.
Preflight gives all kind of shit. One of them is: Red is a 5th plate. It is not! Another is: text will not overprint. What??? It is black text and black is standard set to
overprint. And a lot of messages I did not understand and of course do not remember right here and now.

And Pitstop tells us the font is not OK. The colors are
wrong. I tried everything. The message is the same.
I sent it to the publisher and everything is fine…….then I think, what bullshit.

I must admit, we are still (not for long anymore) on Quark
4.11 and we use Suitcase XI, all under Tiger/Classic. But it
was the same under OS 9. And one test with InDesign gave the same abacadabra.
—
steg

“steggy” said:

One example from today. Not Pitstop,
but making a PDF and using Acrobat Pro
for Preflight.
An addie. Red background, converted
to CMYK. Three small images, scans of
covers of the magazine the ad is about.
Text. Simple! 1/4 of a page.
Preflight gives all kind of shit.

GIGO

One of them is: Red is a
5th plate. It is not!

Something, somewhere is set to image as a spt colour named “Red”. Didn’t you use the Inspector to check this?

Another is: text will not overprint.
What??? It is black text and black is
standard set to overprint.

Normally the complaint is black is _not_ set to overprint — happens often in graphics from Illustrator.

And a lot of
messages I did not understand and of
course do not remember right here and now.

… I tried everything. The message is the
same. I sent it to the publisher and everything
is fine…….then
I think, what <vugarity elided>.

The difference here is you sent the pdf off and hoped for the best — had it been prepared properly and certified successfully you’d (justifiably) have _expected_ the best — see the difference?

One can fix pretty much anything in a .pdf using PitStop (exceptions include “cool shade” gradients and duotones).

Next time you have such a difficulty put it up somewhere and I’ll see if I can look it over.

William

steggy wrote in
news::

Eric Gill wrote:

And PDF hardly means you cannot do small-scale correction work to files – large scale, yes. I’d rather the only people doing the large-scale work are the originating artists – not me, and not the people I send my files to.

But that is a concern. Certified PDF is sacred now, and how can I check whether some pre press person at the printing office conveniently changes anything or not?

The same way you check whether someone made changes to your native files.

I.E., you send a hardcopy proof and get huffy if something changes.

The one who
delivers the cPDF is totally responsible. I know that was not different from the time we delivered open files. But now they are "officially" closed files, so the proof of who did what is totally on the table of the designer.

I’m not seeing that, either. The myth of "closed" files was put to bed long ago – which is in a way too bad, as I’m constantly getting "requests" from salespeople to change PDFs to work for a new purpose (PDFs that were obviously meant as proofs, more often than not).

The type of error that is likely to be introduced has changed, certainly. No more type re-flows. Lots of screwy glyphs and other font problems

Open up a PDF
in Illustrator and you can mess up a lot.

Yes. Generally, you hose it completely. I suppose this could technically qualify as "large scale correction". In the same way a major fire is "urban renewal."

In article , steggy
wrote:

Your rant. No way.

Here’s a hit with the clue bat… I may not get along with the man, but Lee Blevins is an experienced and intelligent person and knows where his towel is when it comes to prepress.

You’d do well to go back and re-read his "rant" until it sinks in.

The symptoms you describe usually mean that someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing is involved in file production. Sometimes this is easy to deal with, sometimes not.

djb

—
Life. Nature’s way of keeping meat fresh. — Dr. Who

"steggy" wrote:

**BTW" my sympathy to the people of Mississippi and Alabama**

What about the folks in Louisiana? I hope Inez is okay!!!!!!!

Tim

Hello,

I have enjoyed the changes to our workflow. To be sure on any given day I can praise Adobe for their software and curse it the next moment.

Overal the improved connection between design and production has pleased me most. Takes less time to accomplish much in the creative process and move that over into production.

There have been a couple of bumps along the way but mostly success is the norm.

I also think that some credit must be given to the RIP manufacturers. Bringing the RIPs forward to be able to handle all the new stuff being throw at it. They did it kicking and screaming all the way to the bank.

Between the RIPs and faster processors I seldom run accross a job that will not run DTP. I get some real garbage from clients that does not have enough money, in the job, to even look at it funny. So I will throw it at the DTP system willy nilly and it will run just fine, JPG, wacky fonts and all.

I believe the industry changes due to our complaints and whining. (As long as we are willing to spend more money) So complain loudly if it doesn’t work the way you expect.

Things have changed…

Don’t they always.

Michael

Mohamed Al-Dabbagh wrote:

Hi All!

I think many designers all over the world have started to convert to the weird habits brought to them by Adobe. From the moment I started using InDesign along with Photoshop and Illustrator (CS), I started to feel rather lazy by not pushing myself toward the past compulsory act of saving EPS’s. I wasn’t swallowing the fact of directly placing a JPEG image without converting it to an EPS (watertight) clone. Most unbelievably, to place a Photoshop native (CMYK) format with all transparency it has inside an art prepared for publishing. Now, even Illustrator accepts to swallow a Photoshop native format with all transparency, and InDesign will in turn swallow the final Illustrator native format that contained the original Photoshop art, (though I notice some bugs when I place gradients created in CMYK space in Illustrator, when I try placing the art inside InDesign).
Do you notice that it is a wholly brand new culture in desktop publishing? I started to use Acrobat PDF format (single file) generated by InDesign to ship my final prepress work to color separation shop, WITHOUT shipping my fonts, placed (vector) arts and dozens of (image) files generated by packing procedure.

I hope fellows here report any bugs they noticed by following this relentless new set of habits in publishing. What should we do and what should we don’t? What are the precautions taken when abandon our old (watertight) habits of desktop publishing?

Mohamed Al-Dabbagh
Senior Graphic Designer

—

steggy wrote:

One example from today. Not Pitstop, but making a PDF and using Acrobat Pro for Preflight.
An addie. Red background, converted to CMYK. Three small images, scans of covers of the magazine the ad is about. Text. Simple! 1/4 of a page.
Preflight gives all kind of shit. One of them is: Red is a 5th plate. It is not!

It seems very unlikely that any software would make this up. There are six plate names that could appear that might be misleading: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (which are process plates), All (which is registration) and None (which is invisible). If it says there is a plate called Red, then there almost certainly is one, even if there is nothing visible set in that plate. Did you try making separations, to check?

Another is: text will not overprint.
What??? It is black text and black is standard set to
overprint.

Again, it is more likely that the message is right than that it is wrong.

And Pitstop tells us the font is not OK. The colors are
wrong. I tried everything.

Details?

I sent it to the publisher and everything is fine……

Maybe the pre-flight rules are too strict. This is a common problem.

—————————————-
Aandi Inston
Please support usenet! Post replies and follow-ups, don’t e-mail them.

Peggy wrote:

O, sweet William!

"William F. Adams" wrote in message

Remember. Opinions are like buttocks, only those which are well-formed should be shown in public.

I am SO stealing that!!!

Aleady done. Is this yours, William, or can you supply attribution if it isn’t?

—
John McWilliams

Remember: Opinions are like buttocks; only those which are well-formed should be shown in public.

John asked:

Aleady done. Is this yours, William, or can you supply attribution if it isn’t?

It’s my translation of something my mother used to say.

William

John asked:

Aleady done. Is this yours, William, or can you supply attribution if it isn’t?

It’s my version of something my mother once tried to explain to me, so I guess I’m to blame.

William

Dave Balderstone wrote:

In article , steggy
wrote:

Your rant. No way.

Here’s a hit with the clue bat…

Here is the basket.
Keep on snipping so you do not need to answer the contents, but just have fun.

—
steg

Tim Monk wrote:

"steggy" wrote:

**BTW" my sympathy to the people of Mississippi and Alabama**

What about the folks in Louisiana? I hope Inez is okay!!!!!!!
Tim

Sorry, I missed that……..I hope so too.
—
steg

In article , steggy
wrote:

Here is the basket.
Keep on snipping so you do not need to answer the contents, but just have fun.

I addressed your "contents".

I said:

The symptoms you describe usually mean that someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing is involved in file production. Sometimes this is easy to deal with, sometimes not.

You say you are an expert, so there is no way the error messages you see can be real.

People I KNOW are experts (like Lee) are telling you that you are mistaken, and that if you are seeing error messages then there are errors.

Just because you don’t *like* the answers you are receiving, it diesn’t mean the asnwers are *wrong*.

djb

—
Life. Nature’s way of keeping meat fresh. — Dr. Who

Dave Balderstone said:

You say you are an expert, so there is no way the error messages you see can be real.

People I KNOW are experts (like Lee) are telling you that you are mistaken, and that if you are seeing error messages then there are errors.

Likely a good example of this would be found in the “Red” plate error cited previously — since the job was sent in and printed okay, the likely case here is that there is some object which should be “White”, but is instead 0% spot colour “Red”

Doesn’t affect the printing (so long as the RIP operator suppresses the empty Red plate — anyone want to ‘fess up to their record of expenditure for blank film?) but does (justifiably) preclude certification w/o fixing it.

William

William F. Adams wrote:

If you don’t know how to fix the errors, how can you expect to have confidence in knowing what it means for there to be no errors in certification?

When I am in a hurry, no spot colors are involved, small number of pages layouts, and had some errors that cannot be easily tracked in that limited time, I use the method of trying to rasterize the PDF in hand using Photoshop, on another machine, that contains only the minimal surviving set of fonts, and the CMYK setup is set to the required black generation, then I let the client sign his approval on the Photoshop’s printout!

Mohamed Al-Dabbagh
Senior Graphic Designer

"Mohamed Al-Dabbagh" wrote:

William F. Adams wrote:

If you don’t know how to fix the errors, how can you expect to have confidence in knowing what it means for there to be no errors in certification?

When I am in a hurry, no spot colors are involved, small number of pages layouts, and had some errors that cannot be easily tracked in that limited time, I use the method of trying to rasterize the PDF in hand using Photoshop, on another machine, that contains only the minimal surviving set of fonts, and the CMYK setup is set to the required black generation, then I let the client sign his approval on the Photoshop’s printout!

Okay. Weird. That’s not only really-bad practice, but it’s also a HUGE disservice to your clients. Why exactly do you go about ruining final output, rather than fixing things upstream? This doesn’t make any sense to me. Are you joking, and forgot to use an emoticon, maybe? I hope so.

There are no shortcuts when it comes to prepress. Fix the problems, don’t work around them in unconventional ways. Read William’s question again. Think about it. Ponder exactly what he’s asking…

Okay, now that you’ve done that, why don’t you answer his question. I’m curious, too.

?,

Tim

Tim Monk wrote:

Okay. Weird. That’s not only really-bad practice, but it’s also a HUGE disservice to your clients. Why exactly do you go about ruining final output, rather than fixing things upstream? This doesn’t make any sense to me. Are you joking, and forgot to use an emoticon, maybe? I hope so.

Just imagine that you have 20 minutes to dispatch the design to the color separation and client decided to make some modification, and the design does not actually contains briliant gems, and has no spot colors, and the client has actually provided you with humble pictures, and paid for electricity only!

Most serious preflight complains include RGB warnings, font unavailability, placed arts problems, etc. However you have to notice that clean (no complains) rasterization in Photoshop of a PDF file, using the required CMYK conversion curve, with 300 DPI resolution or more, will eventually indicate having acceptable result when you RIP a PDF! And guess what? This is not a joke! {:-|

Mohamed Al-Dabbagh
Senior Graphic Designer