Crowded type?

[John_Slate@adobeforums.com]

I work for a printer using a Screen TrueFlow rip. (PDF based)

Occasionally we will receive PDFs that screw-up at the rip.

And what I mean by "screw-up" is that a line of type will, in the mildest case, look like a few of the kerning pairs are off, but it is really chopped up point type segments that are slightly out of position.

In the worst case, all the letters of the line are all crowded together on top of each other.

And the problem is hit or miss.

We could get 8 PDFs from one customer, and the exact same font will be fine in 6 of the PDFs but, screwed up in 2.

In all cases, the PDFs preview fine in Acrobat or any other application. They just get messed up at the rip.

It smells like some type of font embedding problem, and maybe font licensing restrictions play into it, but we have not been able to definatively get a handle on the problem, even using Pitstop Pro.

Does anyone have any insight to this issue?

PS: On a side note, we once used the export PDF option from Quark v7, which ostensibly should have embedded the fonts, and got a bunch of slightly shifted type, but when we printed postscript it was fine. (1 strike against exporting PDF from qxp7)

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

John, firstly the TrueFlow system is a workflow tool but not a true PDF
workflow system since it converts all PDFs back to postscript prior to
rendering ...

Have you run these files that render incorrectly through a preflight? I
know the Screen system has a basic one, but through Acrobat or Enfocus
Pitstop against a profile wuch as PDF/X-1a?

Lastly, if the files pass the preflight and still provide problems -
explain your workflow a little more (before we all start screaming about
a non compliant CID renderer) ...

Cheers!

Jon

[John_Slate@adobeforums.com]

Tried Acrobat7 preflight...

A bit daunting that interface... eyes glazing over.

Tested with the Sheetfed offset CMYK profile on one problem file and got "text uses artificial outline style"

[graffiti]

"text uses artificial outline style"




If I had to guess I'd say they were using a faux font in the document.

In other words, they were bolding a font in a family where bold wasn't available.

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

If both PDFs errored then I think we might be onto something - if only
one then the pseudo styling might be a red herring.

When you load the problem PDFs in Acrobat go File/Document Properties
and tell us the font formats (Font tab) - Type 1, Truetype,
Composite/Double-Byte etc., etc. Also in the Description tab, what is
the PDF producer?

Jon

[John_Slate@adobeforums.com]

11 different fonts, all embedded subset, all type 1, all custom encoding.

Description reveals QXP v7.0 as Producer; PDF version 1.4

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

Interesting - this basically reveals the fact the fonts are nothing
special, however the PDF producer being Quark 7 (in-built JAWS
PDF-Library) might be ...

One last thing, could you check the rogue PDFs against the PDF/X-1a
profile and see if anything else is thrown out?

Jon

[John_Slate@adobeforums.com]

<http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1BthOP88gzpmkwhnXe0P3MxArXKvqV0>

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

John,

Could you please confirm if the OPI error only occurs on the two
problematic pages - or across the board?

OPI is a sometimes nasty reference layer which is applied through an
option under the ADVANCED section of Distiller ...

Let us know,

Jon