I am currently doing my graduation on a project for a printing company, which involves JDF and obviously, PDF. I'll admit right now that I'm still very much a newbie to PDF, it wasn't until the problem below popped up that I started analysing the internals of PDF files.
Their documents are processed by AGFA's ApogeeX, and the plan is to send them directly to the printers over LPR, accompanied by a JDF ticket. However, in my testing I came across a problem; the PDF files created by ApogeeX are pretty complex (details below) and the printers can't handle them. Up to 30-40 pages it *might* work (but sometimes even 2-page files fail), but beyond that it can't RIP the files anymore. The RIP software is proprietary, and I have no control over it whatsoever. The input documents are pretty simple, mostly text really, spread across a good 600 pages or so - no forms and only a handful of images. They typically come from InDesign, but these documents are no problem for the printer. The main thing ApogeeX does is imposition, and it does so by putting a whopping 19 XObjects on each page, in addition to the original document's page contents. These XObjects are cut markers and two job/time stamps on the short sides of the sheets. When I do the imposition with Quite Imposing or Creo Preps the files print fine, and they (can) also include the cut markers. On top of that, the files created by ApogeeX are excessively large; a 600 page PDF becomes about 150 MB. This is not the cause of the problem however, as we have tried optimising them in Acrobat, ran them through GhostScript and all sorts of things which resulted in much smaller files, but none of those worked either, with one exception described below. I have consulted with the printer manufacturer as well, and they suggested flattening the XObjects. While I'm in the process of testing whether this works by manually doing that, I was wondering if there's a quicker way to do this through iText? Their exact suggestion was to eliminate the XObjects by replacing them by their content streams, preceded by their transformation matrix. I have done a quick test by running the ApogeeX files through Acrobat's Preflight -> Flatten Annotations and Form Fields, and those print just fine while still retaining the cut markers, stamps and content with no visual anomalies. Obviously we are working with both AGFA and the printer manufacturer to determine the exact cause of the problem (and to get a solution implemented once we do), running every file through Acrobat's Preflight is undesirable. I have been comparing the files created by the various pieces of software, so that alone is pretty time consuming, hence my mailing to this list in order to get some help to speed it up a bit on the programming side of things. Example files I can provide if there's anyone willing to try and assist me in this, because like I said I'm still very new to PDF. I've used iText before, but never went this deep into PDF with it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Protect Your Site and Customers from Malware Attacks Learn about various malware tactics and how to avoid them. Understand malware threats, the impact they can have on your business, and how you can protect your company and customers by using code signing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Many questions posted to this list can (and will) be answered with a reference to the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ Please check the keywords list before you ask for examples: http://itextpdf.com/themes/keywords.php
