Graphic designers: what's the mysterious missing link between a home-made PDF and a universally-printable ad image?

June 27, 2009 9:52 AM

Graphic designers: what's the mysterious missing link between a home-made PDF and a universally-printable ad image?

I'm a professional dog walker. Once or twice a year I like to place a full-page ad in a community theatre program/playbill. I use a font I like which I've purchased from Adobe, and I hire a professional photographer to "shoot" the pooches who are modeling for that particular ad.
I set the page up using a template provided by Apple iWorks Pages (like Word, only not retarded.) I slap the photo in there, create my clever text, and credit my photographer in the ad.
Last year I set it all up, saved it to a PDF, then sent the PDF to the people who sent the rest of the program information to the printers. I neglected to ask to see a proof. In case you can't smell what's coming; my special font didn't "read" (it looked like typewriting), the spacing of the body copy was wacky, and the whole thing looked horrid.
I asked some designy friends how this could be, when a PDF is itself a photo of the image of the ad. Right? They answered that if the printer didn't have that actual font, it wouldn't "read," regardless.
This year I set up my ad, put it on a disk, and took it into a professional image/design shop. I asked them to set it up in such a way that the dumbest printing shop would make it come out infallibly. I don't know what magic wand they waved over it, but my ad printed exactly as designed by me. Total happiness ensues, and the design shop won a fervent new client.
What did they do that I can't do? I'm using a Mac Mini running Leopard 10.5.7, if that matters. I don't have Photoshop, InDesign, Quark, or Publisher, nor do I wish to buy or learn any of these, just for designing an ad twice a year. I'd rather be a client!
I searched some former, tangentially-related posts, but none really named the thing that the design shop did.

posted by BostonTerrier to media & arts (18 comments total)

What he did was embed the fonts. What you're looking for is somebody to preflight your PDF to avoid this, and many, many other problems. Try contacting a professional, or advertising in Craigslist and asking them to do it for you - and you might expect to pay extra because the tools you're using might require them to recreate some, or all, of your art in the appropriate formats.
posted by Orb2069 at 10:19 AM on June 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'm a layperson, not a graphic designer. But your issue with the font last year is because you didn't embed the font in the PDF. I had to learn about this the hard way too (Chinese characters in my case), so I always embed subsets of fonts now.

Whatever program you use to create the PDF, check if it has an option for a "press ready" PDF. That will create a PDF with the correct DPI for printing and embedded fonts, which will lead to higher quality printing. The blog I linked to about embedding has another post on preparing print-ready PDFs that was pretty good.
posted by gemmy at 10:31 AM on June 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

I don't know iWorks, but what Orb2069 & Gemmy said is correct. Definitely a font embed issue. A lot of making print-ready PDFs assume you have at least Acrobat Professional (can't use just reader), so they may not entirely work for you. In a cursory google on Embedding Fonts & iWorks, it sounds like it is problematic (silly Apple!). I don't know iWorks at all, but here's a couple of possible work arounds:

If you can save your file as a TIFF or JPEG or some other Pixel Based image you won't have that issue. You want the final image to be 300 Dots per Inch at 100% size and you want the colors to be CMYK (not RGB). You should not see any loss of quality at those settings.

OR, if there is the option to take the typeface and turn it all into outlines/paths (ie, turn it into ART not text), you'll also be fine. Of course, you can't easily change your text after that, so make sure you don't save over your original.

Finally, you could make your PDF as you have done and then send it **AND** a folder with the typefaces you used to your printer along with a printout of what it should look like. That does put a bit more of the responsibility on the printer, but it is still a Standard Operating Procedure (just usually with original files, not PDFs). Let the printer know you're going to be doing that.
posted by Wink Ricketts at 10:44 AM on June 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

Here's another option:

If you have Photoshop, you can import your PDF into PS, then Flatten it. This will "bake" everything into a single image which you can then save as a Photoshop PDF.

I sometimes have to do this when sending a file to someone using old software that can't handle transparencies that may be present.
posted by Fleebnork at 10:47 AM on June 27

Oh, and make sure to de-select anti-aliasing when you import, so edges of type stay nice and crisp.
posted by Fleebnork at 10:48 AM on June 27

I asked some designy friends how this could be, when a PDF is itself a photo of the image of the ad.

The PDF does contain an image of the dogs. However, within these files, text is represented as regular text (ASCII or UTF, to be technical) with markup to declare it to be of font "whatever". This makes it easy to change the font, and works great on your machine, because you found the font and installed it on your computer; however the print shop didn't do this step (pricey!) and hence the printer used the ugly font as a fall-back.

PDF isn't just a bitmap or image. It is in theory a Portable Document Format. This is supposed to mean you can ship it to a friend or print shop and they can both view and edit it. In practice, the software to edit PDFs is expensive and as you've discovered, fonts aren't as portable as they should be.
posted by pwnguin at 10:52 AM on June 27

Looks like there are relatively cheap ways to solve the problem... it might not be as simple as it is with Adobe Acrobat Pro, but it looks like it'll do the job.
posted by fearnothing at 10:59 AM on June 27

Use the PDF-X setting. When you go to the Print dialog in Pages, the PDF button has the PDF-X option as the sixth item. This will embed the font(s).
posted by i_cola at 11:10 AM on June 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

Another older format is called EPS, for encapsulated postscript. When I was a graphic design student in the mid nineties we used to use these for saving a layout that could be seamlessly imported into another program (like Quark). If it was artwork, like a poster, we'd convert the type into outlines first. EPS better fits the evolutionary "missing link" metaphor in your original question although it doesn't really solve your problem.

Even the dumbest print shop would have output your original ad flawlessly if they had happened to have the font you specified in your layout. And if you had used a mainstream font like Helvetica or Garamond then they almost certainly would have had it. Before PDF was mainstream, graphic designers used to routinely send copies of all the necessary fonts along with the original digital file (EPS, Quark, etc) and all necessary assets (images for example) when using a service bureau. This wasn't exactly legal since the service bureau hadn't purchased the fonts, but it was more practical than dealing with the translation problems you mention.

As for your other two questions: No, a PDF isn't a photo of the image of your ad. And what did they do that you can't do? Their job. If you'd rather be a client then you shouldn't have to worry at all about the intricacies of digital production.
posted by Jeff Howard at 12:36 PM on June 27

As a client, the only thing you should do differently in the future is include a paper printout of your ad when you submit your digital file for output. This way the printer has some idea about your original intention. This is fairly common, even with a PDF workflow. Otherwise, the printer might just think that you like typewriter type. But if they can see the difference between the output and your own proof, then there's a better chance that they'll catch the problem.
posted by Jeff Howard at 12:44 PM on June 27

OS X embeds fonts anyway even if you don't select PDF-X (as far as I can tell from looking at documents I've created and listing the embedded fonts), so I'm not sure that's the issue.
It could be something more obscure, like the printers having a setup that's picky about the type of font or choking on that specific font.

Other problems that amateurs cause for printers include iffy use of colour (using RGB colours that won't translate well to CMYK), not considering overprinting (where inks will be overlaid rather than obscuring each other), using low resolution bitmaps, and not using precisely the correct size with the correct 'bleed' if required. I occasionally do print work but always make sure someone more knowledgeable checks and adjusts the files, as I'm not set up properly with a calibrated display/printer/scanner and have limited expertise.

If you're not certain you'll get to approve a proof, it's a good idea to include a medium res bitmap version of the file (even just a screengrab) so the printer can check the layout and fonts. But then there is the risk of them sending that to print if you don't label/document things properly, or they're very lazy/stupid.
posted by malevolent at 12:44 PM on June 27

Jeff Howard is correct: the easiest way to ensure the output will remain the same without embedding the fonts—while still maintaining the native scaling ability—is to convert it to Encapsulated Postscript (EPS). Please don't rasterize it into a TIFF or JPG.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:54 PM on June 27

If you have Photoshop, you can import your PDF into PS, then Flatten it. This will "bake" everything into a single image which you can then save as a Photoshop PDF.

Do not do this.

This would transform the entire layout into a single rasterized pixel image, which means that when it's printed, anything that used to be stored as vectors (such as all your text) will come out blocky and pixelated. (Even if you try to save it from photoshop as a PDF, all it would be doing is placing a rasterized picture of your text into the PDF.) You want to keep the vector shapes, because they will print clearly at any resolution.
posted by ook at 1:23 PM on June 27

Do not do this.

This would transform the entire layout into a single rasterized pixel image, which means that when it's printed, anything that used to be stored as vectors (such as all your text) will come out blocky and pixelated. (Even if you try to save it from photoshop as a PDF, all it would be doing is placing a rasterized picture of your text into the PDF.) You want to keep the vector shapes, because they will print clearly at any resolution.

Generally speaking, ook is right and civil_disobedient's eps suggestion is the way to go, but you can get away with this if you know what your destination resolution needs to be. You should know this anyways because if your photos aren't sufficiently high res, they'll come out blurrier than they need to be.
posted by juv3nal at 2:15 PM on June 27

What did they do that I can't do?

Did you ask them? There are several possibilities. From your description of the software you used to build and the final destination, it's possible that they made an EPS or PDF or even rasterized it. It's only a community theatre playbill, which probably isn't the highest quality, either in DPI (dots per inch) or output (the type of paper used, what's used to actually print it, etc).

My point here is that everyone is guess and while some are probably right, it's impossible to say for sure, as a lot of small print shops have quirky ways of working which works for them. Ask the design shop how they saved it if you really want to know what they did. They are the only ones who can give a definitive answer.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:22 PM on June 27

There's no reason the OP should need to worry about issues of destination resolution. If they're using a professional photographer then it's almost certainly okay. And rasterizing the layout as a bitmap at 1200 dpi or whatever the printer actually needs would make an enormous file. Photoshop is only for images.

Since the OP doesn't have the necessary software to produce an EPS, I think they should just burn the PDF along with the original Apple Pages file, the font and the photo onto a CD and give it to the design house along with a basic paper printout. Then wash their hands of the whole mess and wait for the dog walking money to roll in.
posted by Jeff Howard at 4:39 PM on June 27

I was speaking from experience having successfully printed ads using this method. I agree, it's not the best method, and I only use it if I absolutely have to:

I have created many ads for a small-town newspaper who are still using Pagemaker (Yeah, I know) and who get "Transparencies may not print" error messages if I send them a normal PDF that hasn't been processed in this way. Even if the ads don't contain any actual transparencies!

The ads print just fine because I create them at 1:1 and they are the appropriate resolution for the ad size.

Agreed, it's not the technically recommended solution, but it does work. Sometimes you have to do things in unusual ways when you're dealing with an unusual situation.

However, Jeff Howard's suggestion to give the printer all files/fonts/images on a CD is the best solution, agreed.
posted by Fleebnork at 8:14 AM on June 28

Turning off antialiasing and rasterizing your text goes well beyond "not the best method" IMHO. It might give barely acceptable results for newsprint, where things are going to be a bit blurry no matter what you do, but it's still bad advice. Even at 1:1 resolution you're still winding up with aliased text.

Pagemaker can read EPS, can't it? I'd bet you'd get much better results if you used that for your small-town newspaper.

Yes, I am a design snob. Aliased text literally makes my skin crawl. There are certain badly-kerned billboards in my area that I drive out of my way to avoid.
posted by ook at 9:31 AM on June 28 [1 favorite has favorites]