which pdf out of quack?

[beermonster]

folks

i would like to get a collective opinion from you guys n gals - just to either confirm of not my thoughts

i got this customer, we do work for them regularly, and its quack 7 from a pc (i use macs)

i always have font issues - they use "collect" and it gathers their TT fonts - thing is the TT fonts have weird names and never seem to work on my mac - its always a wrestle

anyhoo - i'm looking to spend some time with them and make things easier and smoother for both of us by suggesting they send me pdf's from quark - and NOT the original files

i was thinking asking for pdf/x1a - do we or do we not think this is a good idea?

x1a forces swop standards (unless i'm greatly mistaken - which happens a lot!) - and we dont go to that - more a europen standard really - so which pdf standard do you think i should ask for which will force font embedding and exclude the incorrect profiles?

or am i just all muddled and in a mess - which is a possible as i'm in a bit of a tizz today :embarrassed:

tia

[frailer]

Hi beer, only posting really cos I'm still up and can hear loud ZZZzzz noises coming from the Nth America direction; though you Uk guys should be around, right?

So, this customer's got the best of both worlds; Q7 and PC. Ideally, here, we'd use TransType to convert the TTs, [and any other Win fonts]. I can see why you like PDFs that work. If you are doing direct consult? ...like going over there and sitting with 'em to set 'em up? What about setting up a "create .ps for later Distilling". Create a Watched Folder for them. All they'd have to do then is collect the PDFs outa there for you...and delete the .ps's. Get in there and set up a Distiller preset called "Beer's PDFs". I've just done that for any Quack jobs that will be going through DynaStrip. Works a treat. There's a guy over at PP who's quite obsessive about this route. You could easily track it there under Quack; he gives the full Monty on setup.

When the others wake up you'll get plenty of input. But if you could set'em up...you'd be laughing. Oh, that's right, you do that anyway.   :laugh:    :laugh:

[beermonster]

<snork> haa yeah mate i laugh at their files!

i get the impression that a pdf pre-set kind of thing would just confuse them even more - i'm thinking simplest route out of quack and easiest route for me - my thought is press ready or x1 or x3

just wanted anyones thoughts on which might be the best

also - i have to, EVERY TIME, put a varnish area on the fronts and reverse. on the fronts, there's an image of a girl and that is varnished (a nice area with hair to trace round) - so we have a master file (psd and dcs) that we import into quack instead of their image (its always the same one) - so i'm hoping to supply them with that as well - and do the varnish on the reverses (a simple box covering some square images) of all the three designs - hopefully when it comes in, i'll have varnish areas, cutter for position and a nice calm pdf ready to chuck straight into indy and proof.

thats the plan anyway :undecided:

[EyeTech]

Hi beer, yeah you're right that PDFx-1a's default is swop but you can create a copy of it and modify to use fogra27 or europrepress 2 profiles. Have a look at distiller>settings>edit PDF settings...

If you run the PDF out from QXP, you'll need to knock off the OPI setting otherwise neither distiller nor Indy will make a PDFx-1a only Press Quality.

[Joe]

Does Quark even have a setting for pdf/x1a in a direct export? For some reason I was thinking not. To get one you'd have do what frailer mentioned and to a ps file and then distill with distiller. But, I've tried this with some of my customers and the problem with pdf/x1a is if it finds RGB it fails. If it finds font problems it fails. It was just too much trouble for my customers to have to fix all of those things so they would just revert to some other setting and set their font settings to warn and continue and then ship that turd off to me and I pull out my trusty ninja pitstop tools and go to work. Good luck if you can get them setup properly.

[jezza]

The best thing to do would be modify a distiller steiing as already mentioned. As eye-tech said select a setting and change whts needed by you, wether that be press ettings font embedding or whatever.

x1a may be a little duanting for them, especially if they read the list of why it fails!

[EyeTech]

Not sure if quark 7 can PDFx but what I meant to say (but failed to explain well) was that if you take a Quark Press Quality PDF that hasn't had OPI turned off and place it into Indy for later PDFx-1a output it will fail - you can still make a Press Quality PDF tho'.

I think I just confused myself a little there!

[beermonster]

thanks folks - pretty much confirms my thoughts - i think what i'll do is ask for a pdf from them, create outlines of everything using the transparent watermark trick and go from there. maybe i'll ask for an x3 pdf - see how they cope making that!

eye tech - man thats a good tip - especially since i'd be taking their pdf's straight into indy. we'd do what we normally do (which isnt necessarily pdf out from there), but thats a great heads up in case i wanted to - ta  :wink: