Hum,
Doesn’t it recognize any other formats?
Many RIPs can interpret TIFFs, so that may be a solution…
Another option is to resize at the RIP (again if possible, but a good large format RIP should allow that)
No it recongnizes other formats. It just doesn’t recongnize the vector information in any other PDF format. I’m really after the advantages of leave all the text vector during the enlargment process in the rip to keep all the text and shape layers sharp.
I’d still like to know the exact size limits, but I’ve found a work around. We’ve increased the PPI setting to 1400 without resampling the file and we can get a 40 foot document to fit on a letter size page and the PDFs are then able to be saved as (Acrobat 4) 1.3 format. I know we can do larger documents then letter size, so the large I can keep the document the lower the PPI setting can go.
Does anybody out there know the maximum document size? I can’t find it in the PS help documentation.
I’ve done a bunch of searches in that 700 page document and I’m not coming up with much. I’m just going to start making a bunch of differnt sizes and see which ones let me save which ones don’t. That will be faster than reading through 700 pages of technical info.
I’ll post what I find incase anyone else runs into this issue.
Looks like 45" x 45" is the magic number. I should have done this a while ago. H & W, 45.1 doesn’t work, 45 and below does.
Thanks everyone.
Appendix C of the PDF specification contains information about the maximum page size. Prior to PDF 1.6, the max size of a page is 200 inches x 200 inches (14,400 units, where a unit is 1/72 inch.)
Photoshop will allow you to create images up to this size for PDF 1.4 or later, but limits the maximum size to 45 inches x 45 inches for PDF 1.3 (the reasons for this are not entirely clear, but there probably were good reasons for this at the time.)
PDF 1.6 provides an alternate way to overcome the 200 inch limit, but this hasn’t been very widely adopted. In particular, Photoshop does not support this 1.6 extension and so you will be limited to 200 x 200 inches even if you specify PDF 1.6 (or in CS3, PDF 1.7)
If you want to create a PDF 1.3 document from Photoshop that is larger than 45 inches, you can create the document as PDF 1.4, open it in Acrobat, change it to 1.3 and resave.
Paul
As an addendum to my previous post, Appendix H of the PDF spec includes this:
"In Acrobat viewers earlier than version 4.0, […] the maximum is 3240 by 3240 units (45 by 45 inches)."
So, the 45 inch limit was due to limitations of (now ancient) versions of Acrobat reader, and was not a formal part of the specification. This is the reason Photoshop imposes this limit on PDF 1.3 documents, but I am evaluating whether to change this since current versions of Acrobat do not suffer from this limitation.
