Quark to PDF/Illustrator image DPI problem

[herke]

Hi, we get sent quite a few PDF files from clients that have been done in Quark and exported to PDF (mac or pc) and when we open them here in illustrator the images appear to be less than 300DPI (sometimes 170 etc)

The people who send the artwork swear blind the images are 300dpi before they export.

I dont actually have quark here and so dont have the ability to do some tests. Is this something anyone has come across? is there some default setting lowering the quality?

Any help would be appreciated
Cheers
Neil

[obesebee]

The images may be 300dpi but the PDF resolution could be 72dpi, it depends how they output the PDF.

[PrintDriver]

And what they used to output the pdf.

If you are opening these in Illustrator, why aren't they exporting as eps (bearing in mind that Quark doesn't always do that well either and you may end up with something, usually a text piece, skewed off into the ether)?

At least that way, the images would be embedded at full res. Honking big files though.
And if you say they are making PDFs so they can email them, there's your answer right there. They aren't saving the PDFs at print resolution.

[panzer]

yes they are probably saving to web etc
it will automatically downsample them to 72 dpi

[jimking]

They should export those Quark files as eps and then distill them in distiller at Press quality.

[PrintDriver]

As eps or ps?
;)

[jimking]

Sorry, ps. I've also exported as eps from quark and have had success with it. It depends on how complicated the job is.

[panzer]

i even had a nice ps out of publisher

i know i know eeeww publisher, we want to visit the first 3 letters, when some one sends us a file

[benjo]

They probably have the images downsampled. You know what you can do open the file with photoshop and choose images instead of PDF and you'll get all the images extracted. Check the res on them and if they don't match what you want, stick it to the man!