PDF Creation FAQ

How can I make my own PDF?

There are several common ways to make a PDF.

1. Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Professional are software packages with several tools for making PDFs from within applications.
2. Some applications like Adobe Photoshop, WordPerfect or OpenOffice can save a file directly to a PDF format.
3. A variety of vendors make PDF creation tools that act like printer drivers. You print to a postscript file that then is converted into a PDF. Nearly all of these tools use a version of the free program "ghostscript" to convert the postscript to PDF.
4. It is possible to use a free postscript printer driver to make a postscript file into a PDF. This can have some of the advantages of using Acrobat without the cost.

You may want to consider using Adobe's free PDF creator software. Adobe allows you to create 5 free PDFs so you really want the file to be in its final form before you use one of the 5 conversions. Here is a link to Adobe's PDF creation software

I am using Microsoft Publisher to lay out my pages. All the font options are checked. When I print to PDF, I have a special print definition file that forces inclusion of the Fonts. The file shows an increase in size when I force embed the fonts and the PDF file properties list the fonts as included. I am not sure what else I can do to make this work.

Hmmm, you know Microsoft Publisher has been known to cause problems with printers. For some reason they create 3 images of your original file to compose their image. Then when the book prints some of the pages will have this odd banding problem.

I would recommend that you go to www.adobe.com and take the Microsoft Publisher file and create your pdf using Adobe's free trial option. You can create 5 free pdfs so I would use them wisely :). In other words get your file exactly the way you want it to print and then use a free token to covert to pdf. You can pay $10 and create unlimited pdfs for a month if you want to go the trial and error route. Here is the link to the free option http://createpdf.adobe.com/?v=AHP

For whatever reason the adobe products do much better creating the pdf for the printer than any of the other file editor products. I've seen output problems with most all of the other products.

How do you make a PDF with Adobe Acrobat?

The gold standard for PDF creation is Adobe's Acrobat software. Acrobat is actually a set of Adobe products to produce and manipulate PDFs. In fact, Acrobat offers users 4 different pathways to a PDF with many variations available in some of them:

1. Direct PDF creation from inside the software. Installing Acrobat also installs PDF creation buttons in some applications--notably Microsoft Word. Caution: This method is handy and seems easy but the PDFs often fail to embed all fonts. Finding the settings that will cause font embedding is often a challenge. Sub-optimum PDFs are often the result.
2. Printing to PDFWriter. Various versions of Adobe Acrobat come with an application called PDFWriter. PDFWriter acts like a printer driver that can be selected from application print menus. Instead of printing it creates a PDF file. It creates this PDF directly, without first going through a postscript stage. Caution: It can be useful for text-only PDFs but it does not produce PDFs of the same quality, especially for embedded images, as does Distiller.
3. Printing to Acrobat Distiller. The Adobe PDF application Distiller can also function as a printer driver. When you print to Distiller an intermediate postscript file is produced and that file is automatically passed to Distiller for conversion into a PDF. It is two steps but the transfer to Distiller for PDF conversion is automatic and hidden from sight. It is a good way to make many PDFs but it does not offer all of the variety of settings that manually doing the two steps does. In spite of selecting settings to embed all fonts, this method may leave some fonts not embedded.

What are the requirements of PDFs?

All fonts in the PDF must be embedded. This is often easier said than done. Adobe products and many others assume a set of "built-in" fonts will be available and therefore tend to not embed those. Forcing that embedding can be a challenge.

How can you prevent multiple subset embedding?

There are several ways that PDFs can end up with one or more of its fonts embedded multiple times. This becomes a problem for printing because the commercial printing software can become easily confused about which encoding of the font to use. The result is books that print with pages of text garbled or missing entirely. The embedding can be scrutinized as described in my PDF testing page. Preventing or correcting multiple embeddings of individual fonts is essential.
The documentation that comes with Acrobat (start with the help files) covers these methods for your version of Acrobat and is your best guide. Also look for specific information in the Acrobat documentation about font embedding, embedding of built-in fonts and TrueType font embedding.

A caution about direct export to PDF:
Some word processors and many of Adobe's image and publishing applications are capable of exporting to PDF files. As with other easy ways of making PDFs, this comes at a price of compatibility and flexibility.

I am using Adobe PageMaker 7.0 to create my pdf. My book is 9 x 7. My pmd file is about 35 MB. I am using Adobe PDF to create the pdf, printing through the pageMaker application. I have also tried using Acrobat 6.0 Professional and Acrobat Distiller to create the pdf.

Try these steps using PageMaker 7.0:

• Create a new document with the size 9x7 and the orientation set to "wide"
• Then go to Print
• Select a PDF printer
• There is an option for orientation, select the left option(with the man standing upright)
• Next click on the "Paper" button on the right.
• Under the paper size, select "Custom..."
• A new window called "Custom Paper Size" should pop up
• Set the width to 9 inches and the height to 7 inches and hit ok
• Hit Print and it will create a 9x7 pdf file.

Is there a way I can ensure that my PDF file will print correctly?

• If your book has text, always embed the full font family for all fonts used within the document. Subsetted fonts over multiple pages can cause problems when your PDF is rasterized for print. The result can be your document being printed with symbols instead of fonts, garbled text, or missing text altogether.
• Set compatibility mode to Acrobat 5
• The colorspace of the PDF should be left in its original profile (Do not convert CMYK to RGB or vice-versa)
• Overprint and Simulate Overprint should be turned off.
• The size of your PDF should not exceed 700MB.
• Do not downsample your images unless the images are fully rasterized. If fully rasterized and the DPI is greater than 300, downsample to 300.
• Your final PDF should be one layer.

What should I do to set my image file settings within the PDF:

• Image compression should be set to ZIP if you want lossless (no artifacts/distortion-free) images. To reduce filesize, JPEG -> High should be used.
• If you are printing a color book that has black and white images within it, the black and white images should have the colorspace set to grayscale. Artificial grayscale (RGB or CMYK with near-matching channel values) can be printed with cyan or magenta hues within the image.
• Similar to the PDF settings, images should be left their original profile (do not convert from CMYK to RGB or vice versa).
• For grayscale images, use ZIP encoding. Do not use CCITT.
• The gamma of a grayscale image should be between 2.2 and 2.4
• The image DPI should be between 300 and 600 DPI (300 for smaller filesize)
• Do not use CCITT or LZW compression. LZW compression creates images which are multi-strip, and the printed result may have white lines between the strips of the image.

I plan to create a hardcover book are there special setting?

• DPI settings should be 300.
• Use an untagged CMYK workflow with CMYK TIFF's whenever possible (If the original workflow was RGB, do not convert to CMYK).
• Solid blacks will print solid at 100% with no other colors added. If you do add colors to improve the richness of the black , TAC (total area coverage) should never exceed 270%.
• Avoid very light color builds of less than 15%. Below 15% tint variation is very difficult to control on a consistent basis.

I have several pdfs in a gallery that I would like to print as a single book. Each page in the gallery represents a page of the book (with margins for trimming built in). The first and last pdfs are the front and rear covers respectively. how can i create one book from multiple pdfs?

You can upload the PDF's like normal images into a gallery. As long as there is one page per PDF, everything will work great. However, honestly you would be better off exporting everything out of PhotoShop as individual JPG's because we we will conert all the PDF's to .jpg's behind the scenes and reassemble the book from the converted JPG's. Additionally, for the best cover resolution the back cover needs to be uploaded as a .jpg

I created my photobook using MS Word and converted to a PDF. I see a white line in my book, why?

A PDF made from a Word file via Distiller will print with lines in the images. Multi-strip images are created no matter what job options are selected. Sometimes during printing a pixel width white line is printed (or not printed on) in the images. Therefore, we recommend you do not use MS Word as your source document.

How do I change the size of my PDF in Adobe Distiller?

The default page setting for Adobe Acrobat Distiller is 8.5" x 11". To create a PDF of another size you must change the PDF settings in Acrobat Distiller.

• From the Settings menu, select Edit Adobe PDF Settings. The General settings are displayed.
• In the Default Page Size fields, enter the desired width and height of your document.
• Click Save As and enter a descriptive name for the job options file.

Why would I use the Adobe Preflight tool?

To determine information about a PDF such as image resolution, color space, transparencies, etc., you can utilitize the Preflight tool in Acrobat. Simply click the Document pull down menu, and go to Preflight. There are several job options you can select, List Potential Problems & Output not 100% Predictable are my favorites.. This provides incredibly in-depth information such as individual image resolution, colorspace, etc. We probably want to limit how much information we provide to the author from this report when they encounter print problems, but for the most basic issues such as poor image quality and font problems it can be rather handy. This is a feature only in Acrobat 6.