Thanks for the help (and the always amusing banter!). The job's running at the moment, that turd still ain't shiny but at least it's got bleed.  :shocked: On second thoughts I really don't like the sound of that sentence.

Those files rocked Joe & Matt! How did you make those? It's preserved everything great. The best I could extricate from Publisher's bowels (and ended up running with) had the background sliced up - is printing ok, but that's not really the point.
I suspected not being able to select the images would be something to do with that damn background option but it seems to swallow the source file and then hide it forever, at least from the likes of me.


They should make bullet proof workstations, just think, you could empty a clip into it from your handgun/rifle/artillery cannon of choice and then carry on with lower blood pressure and only mild hearing loss.

Thanks for trying Matt, but that file's a disaster!

The backgrounds have all been squashed up to the very top instead of running the height of the page and the front cover appears to have had some weird colour changes in rectangular sections (flattening artefact?). How did you produce that pdf?

I've been tempted to reply to every spurious email today with the attached picture only... I'm sure they'd work out what I meant pretty quick (d'oh dealing with desingers) eventually. That, or Option 5 anyone that doesn't supply a print ready pdf, with high res images/vectors, in cmyk, with a safe area and 3mm bleed. Then again I don't think I have time to kill all my customers.

I already Pitstopped (that's right, just like Photoshopped except a more exclusive club) the PDF to acceptableness. Although here's a yousendit link for you Matt, fire ahead and see if you can work out what the hell was up with the file for next time.. I got cold sweats when I read "Issue 1" at the top  :shocked:

https://www.yousendit.com/download/VnByYkJ1ZDVwaFJFQlE9PQ

Well I give up, prepress style. As in, I'll just kludge it by stretching the image past the distorted parts with Pitstop. No-one will ever know 

It wasn't header or footer, master page or custom document style, image object, clip art or.. damn I know not how many other ways Publisher allows people to raise my blood pressure - it wasn't any of them anyways. Goddam customers.

Tried printing to PDF printer, postscript and saving as a PDF. On further investigation some of the images are ok, but for some reason I can't select the background images (they main damn problem) for each page... I've dug through all the menus I can think of, and checked master pages - but everything's blank! They aren't even in the innacurately named Graphics Manager. Any clue on how to get to the unselectable background image?

Can I start off by saying 

I've got a (urgent, goes without saying these days) booklet that I need to tease out of Publisher, with full bleed background images. Every time I've tried to get a damn pdf out of it, it cuts the images into a million million pieces and does some other odd things to the colour. I've got all colour conversion turned off and told it to preserve transparency, but no dice. Usually the image slicing isn't so much of an issue but it's doing it very badly on this job.

Anybody come across this before and got a silver bullet for pdfs from publisher?

When I joined this small print shop (took over from the last guy running the machines) I didn't realise for months that we had a copy of pitstop sitting there, uninstalled, that had come with EFI impose. I'd never heard of it before I loaded it on, discovering that was a goood day.  :azn:

Now I have no idea what I did without it..

Well actually I do, it involved a lot of shouting and bodged fixes using photoshop/illustrator 

Can you specify a spot colour as non-printing in Acro/ID? My workflow is basically PDF>ID>Printer RIP or PDF>Printer RIP (is just photocopiers, erherm, digital).

I use colour remapping/changing all the time in Pitstop but haven't found a way to achieve the result other than changing to white overprint (which usually, but not always works).

The situation where this comes up is combined artwork and cutting die in one pdf. Some of my customers just put the forme over the top of the print-ready artwork and then I print the forme&artwork with one copy as a guide, and then the forme lines are removed and the job run. I mean, is usually between 4 and 10 pages but it would be nice to automate it in a neat way.

I've got Acro 8 and Pitstop 7.5

As I said, usually just colour remap to white overprint (or delete them manually if it doesn't work), but is there a way to tell Pitstop/Acro to delete any objects with a specified colour?

Hi, I've had a wee look round and the internet (and around Acrobat) but haven't worked out a good way of removing a spot colour from a job. Now and again I'll need to remove a spot colour that's been used to show a cutting forme on tabs for instance, I usually set it to white overprint but that's a bit kldugy for my taste.

Anyone able tell my dumb ass how to delete spot channels from a PDF?

I was encouraged to use both sides of my job cards (smaller than A8 - wee T cards) to save on paper wastage and be greener.

I did not respond. :rolleyes:

ahh it sounds like you're all running half decent equipment, much jealousy here. Most I got to look forward to in the near future is the 700 replacing the 240..

Why feel dirty when jobs go to digital? We've come a long way since moveable type! Would you have felt the same about jobs moving to DTP, and the same sense of loss when CTP started to become common place? The computerisation in a modern 10 colour perfecting press with inline coaters and driers can't be far off that found in a photocopier.

Ahh business cards, why run them on anything other than digital? Except for the FTB reg of course..

I was keen to get a C6000 a while back but don't have the tech support in our area unfortunately Sample prints looked very impressive though, good bit of kit.

Digital is the new er.. kid on the... umm, production-room. Seriously though, instant set-up time (effectively) and quality not to be sniffed at (when done right - digital has a bad rep largely because a lot of operators barely know what end the paper goes into).

The new inkjet stuff seems pretty exciting, there is a possibility I'll be getting to run one of those new JetPresses in the mid-term if our place goes that way.. just have to wait and see.

I work in a small all-digital print shop, has been left more or less up to me how the 'presses' are run, what paper we use etc. However prepress>digital operator is much more likely than pressman>digital operator. The technology only has a tenuous relationship to litho and so much of the quality and setup is software based and very dependent on the files you feed into the machine.

Also gotta get out of the mindset of run the plates, run the job - you can spool it to the printer again with a change very easily and this opens up a world of possibilities in the way you deal with issues that may occur.

I think when things settle down in the end we'll be looking at toner-based digital presses for short run, high-speed inkjet for medium run and web presses for the big stuff. I'd say that's a fair while away yet though and I hope to be flying airplanes long before then  :azn:

  Me am run those. Running a DC240 and a DC260, along with a Epson9800POS sorry, PRO. Soon to be getting a 700. Anyone got any experience those ones? Other than horror stories about the recent toner shortage?

And who all is running digital production? A lot of litho shops seem to be putting in machines.

Looks like the way the wind is blowing, and although as far as I'm concerned those DCs are jumped photocopiers - I still spank some of the less diligent litho printers in terms of quality. When they're working.. which involves more hammer wielding threats, red-faced swearing and well-placed boots than I'd admit to the customers  :grin: That said you can adjust curves and o/p profiles without running a new set of plates, can do some fancy stuff with that.

I think is a slightly different job to prepress, get to be both pressman, and prepress in one. Allows you to do the just-sucked-a-lemon routine at the reps when they bring in a file made in an antique version of Corel, as well as the evil-eye-oh-god-is-he-about-to-knife-me looks when being interrupted during one of the many pitched battles with the printing equipment.

PS Missed this forum, got really sick of print for a while there and avoided all kinds of extra-curricular activity beyond just running the damn machines. Then I popped on back here for a wee browse and remembered why I loved reading some of the threads in this place...