PDF (Portable Document Format) is one aspect of computer technology that you deal with every day even if you don\u2019t touch a computer. More than just the forms you download from the various government or business websites or the electronic manuals and books you need to use anything these days. It\u2019s used for designing every printed item out there from cereal boxes to billboards. It\u2019s not static either, it has support for video and sound playback, interactive parts, security, comment features and so much more. Of course with all this power does come with a few problems. Problems that lead to the age old questions: \u2018Why can\u2019t you print the pdf I gave you?\u2019, \u2018There\u2019s something wrong with your printer, it didn\u2019t look grainy on my computer\u2019, and the ever favorite \u2018What do you mean you can\u2019t edit my business card? I gave you the pdf the other guys printed with.\u2019 So this article we are going to look at some of the problems we can have with the PDFs you supply and what we have to do to make them work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pretty much every program can save their files as pdf\u2019s and if they can\u2019t you can often use a \u2018print to pdf\u2019 function found in your operating systems. The problem is, it\u2019s not always really a true pdf, it\u2019s just something inside a PDF wrapper. Sometimes we can break the pdf and convert it back to the original file format, letting us edit or adjust it so it can be printed correctly, but not always. Classic examples of this are proofs from other printing companies that are saved as jpegs inside a pdf, or files from \u2018budget\u2019 designers who design things for the screen and not for print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a problem printers have in general. Simply put, these days a lot of pdfs are designed for the screen first and are never expected to be printed. As such they can come with a host of issues<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Password locking is a way to prevent other people altering the information within a pdf. This is a very useful feature but as a printer we see it most often with product brochures for some reason. Normally it\u2019s not an issue, until someone wants to print only a few pages out of a large document or we have to arrange page order. This is against the rules of a locked pdf. Again we have ways around this but it adds a time charge to deal with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You might think that a pdf file is a single document, but it can be a \u2018folder\u2019 containing many sub pdfs. Like locked pdfs, it\u2019s all fine till you have to alter the page order or adjust print sizes and then the file breaks or just won\u2019t print. In these cases we have to break the portfolio into separate jobs and deal with each one in turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We get this most often with architectural and engineering program pdfs. Because they tend to use a lot of layers in their files, when they generate the pdfs those same layers are also included even if they aren\u2019t needed and are hidden. This will make for a big file that is slow to process and can even cause the printer to crash as it tries to figure out how each layer interacts with each other even if we can\u2019t see them. In those cases we end up running the file through a \u2018pre-flight\u2019 program that works out what is needed and strips out everything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now you would think that pdfs that are designed to be editable after creation would be perfect for print companies like us where we are often called upon to do things like update a phone number on a business card. The trouble is that some programs, like all of Adobe’s Creative Suite (the \u2018inventors\u2019 of the PDF format), will by default treat the PDF as the same as their own native files and retain a complete history of every action done in the source file\/s within it. Not only does this lead to an oversized file, but the printer has to then work through all the unneeded bits to figure out what to print. This is where we have to spend the time stripping out the unneeded stuff to make printable files without it mucking up what needs to be printed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This boils down to how the creator of the pdf generated the file. If a font is a custom version that isn\u2019t designed to common standards. If there are images which are referenced by link to a site on the internet that is no longer there. If they made poor design choices when setting up a file, colours become overly dark\/light when made into greys. This is the stuff that is out of our control. While we have some tricks and software that can fix many problems, not everything can be solved without a lot of expensive time put in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A pdf might look right on a screen but is corrupted in some way. You don\u2019t see it because the computer will often fix problems on the fly to make a usable document for you to read. It might also print okay on your home printer, because the computer making work on the screen is making it work on the printer. With our printers being designed to print to an exacting standard and product results you are happy to pay money for, it can\u2019t afford to just \u2018fix things on the fly.\u2019 We will do what we can to try and make it work, using our vast range of tricks and tools, but sometimes the file is in a state that our printer will not accept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what happens when we say that your file is unprintable. As the expression goes, there\u2019s always a solution to every problem, it\u2019s just how much money and time you have to find it. It can be as simple as letting our specialist software run over the file, scrubbing it clean and tweaking layout and it is good to go. It might take a little bit of our billable time to manually adjust things to make it reliable. In some cases we\u2019ve even gone and rebuilt the file from scratch to make a file that is not only print ready, but is of a better quality too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end it is a very rare occasion when we get a pdf file that is so broken that we can not make it printable. If we find a document we can\u2019t quickly fix on your behalf, we\u2019ll let you know and offer up different solutions to solve it. From there follow your instructions to give you the best results we can get out of the file and show you how to avoid the problem in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
PDF (Portable Document Format) is one aspect of computer technology that you deal with every day even if you don\u2019t touch a computer. More than just the forms you download from the various government or business websites or the electronic manuals and books you need to use anything these days. It\u2019s used for designing every … Continue reading “PDFs – An almost perfect solution for universal documents”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,75,105],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1378,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions\/1378"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}