Acrobat Preflight problem

[trese@adobeforums.com]

I am on 10.4.4 using Acrobat 7.0.5 Professional. I create PDFs through Illustrator to check them with customized Preflight Droplets created with Acrobat. Recently I had a piece of art come back with a pitstop error for a hairline stroke that wasn't caught through Acrobat. The stroke was set at 0 points. My preflight profile has a rule to error on any stroke under .25 points. Why isn't this being caught? I even tried to create a rule specifically to catch 0 pt stokes, and it still wasn't caught.

I am also trying to create a rule that will catch stray points and empty text paths similar to the Illustrator "Clean up" menu item.

If anyone is familiar with the preflight features in acrobat 7, please comment. Thanks

[peter kleinheider]

Hi trese

Can you send the PDF along with the used PitStop-profile and the used Preflight profile. I will check this for you.

peter [at] inpetto . cc

rgds

Peter

[Mark_Tezak@adobeforums.com]

I created several tests in Illustrator with different stroke widths and was successful in finding strokes below a certain threshold in Preflight 7.x using a custom profile. It is not easy creating a stroke with 0 pt in Illustrator, and additionally the stroke width selector seems to have some defective behavior.

But my Preflight seems to be doing the right thing with strokes that actually have some width. You also know you can correct hairlines in Acrobat 7.x with the "Fix Hairlines" tool located in the Print Production toolbar.

It also sounds like you are looking for a tool to locate dead anchor points and lines from Illustrator, and Preflight 8.0 may contain some new tools that could help when the product is released.

Having said that, I would like to see your file and Preflight profile, and would appreciate receiving them if you have the time.

Thanks
Mark Tezak
[email]mtezak@adobe.com[/email]

[trese@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for the responses and information. I will be sending the files as soon as possible.
Trese

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

Trese,

It might be best to post onto a public URL somewhere - we can all trawl
through your file then?

;-)

Jon

[peter kleinheider]

Hi Jon

There is indeed a bug in the pdfInpsektor Library of Acrobat 7. Callas fixed this issue for the CLIs and for the preflight engine of Acrobat 8. I doubt that the fix will be implemented in the Acrobat 7 Preflight engine.

rgds

Peter

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

Thanks Peter,

cheers,

Jon

[Mark_Tezak@adobeforums.com]

In my opinion this is not a bug in Acrobat at all, but in the ambiguous way Illustrator assigns stroke widths. If you open the source file in Illustrator (or create a file with a stroke and follow the steps, I used CS2, Mac OS X 10.4.8) and then select the stroke, a zero displays in the stroke width field. However when depressing that field to either (1) discover which value is assigned or (2) re-assign a default value, the first value which begins with a "0" (zero), 0.75 pt is selected. You *cannot* type a zero into the stroke width value field, as when you do, the stroke color turns to <none>, the stroke disappears, and the field completely empties out, not even a zero is displayed. This would then never get rendered into PDF. Thus I am not quite sure how the file was created to contain a stroke with a value of zero pts. But it doesn't...
As a result of all of this, it is not quite clear what the exact stroke width is used in the example that Trese has supplied. Importing the custom profile constructed to look for strokes under .25 pt, Preflight actually flags this stroke, but says at the same time that the stroke has a width of 0.994 pt (not helpful, but is the best answer yet). So yes, it looks like there is a Preflight bug, since 0.994 pt should not be flagged as being < .25 pt, but we'll need to confirm this on an example where the stroke width is clearly defined in the source app.

Mark

[Larry_G._Schneider@adobeforums.com]

Stroke widths of 0 can come from data imported from Excel and some other similar programs. I have seen these in my AI files when remaking charts from Excel.

[Mark_Tezak@adobeforums.com]

Hi Larry,
I can believe that, but do the 'non'-strokes make their way into a PDF from AI and then are actual objects in Acrobat? That's a good tip though, I'll run some tests. Are you referring to stand-alone lines/strokes, or stroked objects?
Mark

[Larry_G._Schneider@adobeforums.com]

Mostly the grid lines and tick marks. It may come from using a hairline in Excel but I know it can happen.