pdf's from Corel 12

[rickself]

I have a customer that puts together a 36 page book in Russian using Corel 12 (maybe 11) and is exporting her pages out as individual pdfs for me, so as to avoid any font issues. 32 pages are b&w, the cover and center spread are 4 color. These files, especially the b&w pages are just choking my RIP BIG TIME, most of the time failing. I told her to save her pdf's as PDFx1a and I'm not sure if this is what she is doing or if she even knows how.

Now I'm taking the files back into Acrobat and saving them to ps files with transparency set to 50, no color managemnent, 150 line/2000 dpi.

We've got a FUJI CV5 RIP, feeding 1 bit tiffs to an AGFA Apogee RIP, all PS Level 3.
Gawd, these things are eating me up!

Any ideas?

[Kool]

EEEK! Sorry no advice, just EEEK! :D

[rickself]

Hay Kool, can we move this over to an Adobe forum and see how many more EEKS I can get?

Rick

[Kool]

LOL, maybe Broacher might have an idea when he wanders in. I've been in so many similar situations and just ended up scratching my head. I once had a 24 page brochure in quark that refused to RIP, just gave me the catch all post script error. It would print fine on the HP proofer. I finally after hours and hours and hours traced it down to one stupid black line in an Illy EPS. it looked just like every other black line but it had an error somehow. In your situation there could be any of a million things causing this. Just another day in prepress hell :D

[rickself]

The customer just got back to me...seems her disigner was having trouble pdf'ing the files. Geez, don't tell the printer you're having problems, good gawd!
New disk is coming...and lo and behold, they can wait til Monday for the proof, even tho they absolutely had to have it today!

Yep, if the devil ever got lost, he'd wander into prepress and feel right at home!:eek:

[cbscreative]

One of the strengths of Corel is it does a good job with PDF, but in the hands of mortals, things can go very wrong. During the PDF export from Corel, there is a checkbox for "Export all text as curves"

Tell your client to check that (under the Objects tab during Export as PDF), crank up the JPG quality to full if there are images and leave the rest of the settings alone. This will make the files bigger, but it should work.

[Broacher]

I'm not a big fan of Draw's PDF export. (And to be fair, the same is true for PDFs directly out of AI). It's okay for small jobs, client proofs-- but I've been burned to many times by little bugs and the resulting PDF is always way bigger than a standard Distiller created PDF. I'd recommend getting the client to exporting the pages as EPSs, and then zipping them to transport/burn to CD. As long as 'text as fonts' is on, the rest of the defaults should be fine for the EPS export. And Distiller seems to have no problem chewing on them. With this route, you minimize the options that the client has to setup, and you get almost ALL the useable data in a form you can control, to some extent. A good principle to remember when dealing with client-generated files.

[NewEra]

hi rick
ihave same problems but with other language
so when u figure it out pls let me know