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Thank you, Leonard, for your extensive explanation. I honestly am not sure if it answers the question about the difference between the three different PDFs I tested today, or muddies the water. >From a printer's point of view, all three PDFs were identical. As you will recall, one of the PDFs I made was from the print to Adobe PDF feature, and another I PS'd and distilled. Both of those PDFs indicated that they were made from Distiller 6.0.1. I don't know how anyone would know which way I made them, and I ask the question again, as a printer how am I going to know that one of the PDFs is tainted? This is just an incredible can of worms. People make PDFs by PSing and distilling, by printing to the Adobe printer, by exporting using the PDF Library, with Ghostscript. and who knows how many other programs? The biggest issues for printers are enough in themselves to cope with: are the fonts embedded, is the resolution correct, is the file CMYK, and will it RIP? If, in fact, the only way to correctly make a PDF is to print to Adobe PDF, then why would Adobe offer an export or save to PDF function in its programs? Why would third party vendors offer alternative software for making PDFs? And if we're all supposed to put on the brakes and start using one method only, what happens when something better comes along? I don't think people are prepared to change their workflows (or habits) that rapidly. I respect your knowledge and expertise as an engineer, but 95% of the people in the trenches (designers and producers) won't have a clue what this all means. When a magazine calls and says send a PDF, they don't ask how it was made...they're mainly interested in the fact that one uses the Press Quality job options. I go back to something I said many threads ago. It's best to discuss production issues between the vendor and the customer, and develop a workflow that works for both parties. Rich ------------------- P.S. Following additional research, I learned today why my colleague was making bloated PDFs file Quark files. He was printing to the Distiller PPD, but using a Laserwriter print driver. By installing the Adobe Virtual Printer (Mac OS 9.2.2), he knocked down the size of a single-page full-color PDF from 16 MB to 3.2 MB. The same page exported from Quark was a whopping 35 MB. ------------------- -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Leonard Rosenthol Sent: Sunday, February 29, 2004 4:24 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PDF-Basics] Postscript generation in Mac OS X PDF-Basics is a service provided by PDFzone.com | http://www.pdfzone.com/ __________________________________________________________________ At 07:44 AM 2/29/2004, Rich Sprague wrote: >Could you please explain your rationale, here, so people can understand >why you are making this claim? Postscript generation in Mac OS X takes a strange a indirect path, unlike generation of PS on Mac OS 9...AND things changed between 10.2 and 10.3... On 9, applications either printed directly in Postscript (in which case it was written directly to disk) OR they printed in QuickDraw which was converted in the PS driver to PS and then written/printed. In OS X, applications can print either in "PS in PICT" (one PICT file, PER PAGE, with embedded Postscript), or Quartz. In the latter case, Quartz is converted to PDF and then PDF is sent to the printing system - and to get Postscript, the PDF is converted to Postscript and then fed to the PS "printer driver". In the former case, the PICTs are "unwrapped" and the PS data is sent to the driver along with job-level instructions and then printed/saved. Since the apps can't write entire jobs of PS, only page-level PS, it's not possible to send a "pure PS stream" to the printer as it was in 9. With 10.3, things got even more interesting when Apple made two more changes to the print system. First, they added the ability to send a PDF directly from an application to the printer - this is what Acrobat 6.0.1 does, thus speeding up printing to non-PS printers. Second, the integrated Adobe Normalizer providing a PS->PDF conversion in the printing system to allow printing of PS from apps like Quark and Illustrator to non-PS printers. Bottom line - there is NO WAY for an application in OS X to produce the EXACT STREAM of PS that will be sent to the printer as there was in OS 9 - and as such, it should be considered "tainted". Even more important is that the PDF->PS process used for non-PS generating application (ie. anything that isn't prepress, or that is written in Cocoa) will create PS that if then fed back into Distiller will generate poor quality PDFs - most esp. with non-searchable fonts :(. So, if you are using Mac OS X, and your goal is high quality PDF - go DIRECTLY from your authoring application! Leonard --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Chief Technical Officer <http://www.pdfsages.com> PDF Sages, Inc. 215-629-3700 (voice) 215-629-0789 (fax) To change your subscription: http://www.pdfzone.com/discussions/lists-pdfbasics.html To change your subscription: http://www.pdfzone.com/discussions/lists-pdfbasics.html
