I am laying out a magazine and the ads are often supplied as .pdf files. I am working in Quark 6.5/Mac (if that matters). Some of the ads place correctly, but many do not. They either won't parse at all, or they don't render fully. I have no idea what versions of acrobat are being used (6/7/8?)- and they come from multiple sources, or what the native apps/platforms are, or how they are being created/ via print to .pdf tools or distiller.
First, can you determine the cause of the problem?
Second, are there guidelines available that I can supply to the agencies that would eliminate this problem in the future?
Third, would working in Quark 7 or indesign 3 eliminate this problem completely?
The best suggestion I can give at this stage (since it can be a real pot of worms) would be to utilise the preflight facility within Adobe Acrobat Professional to check against common problems with incoming PDFs. If you have a bad PDF which does not have the fonts included, low resolution images, incorrect colours and other embedded content then it's sometimes back to the drawing board. At least after preflight you know if the PDF is good or bad.
The second stage is indeed the application you use to merge this content together. Yep, sounding biased I'm going to recommend InDesign CS3 since it's PDF import and export engine is extremely PDF savvy so to speak. In other words, it's based around the Adobe PDF Library. This does overcome common Quark issues such as the PDF version upon import as well as the ability to generate PDFs via InDesign directly without having to go back to postscript of EPS (so really bad tranformations can occur at this point). I have a lot of experience with both import and export engines using both applications and I fully support InDesign based on the track records.
There are standards in the industry for PDF for Print and they include the ISO 15930 specification for PDF/X (which Adobe supports) and other independent organisations such as the Ghent PDF Workgroup (www.gwg.org) who publish specifications for best practice in PDF generation, preflight and output.
I know it's a lot to take on-board but let me know if you have any other questions?
All the best,
Jon
I've been using Acrobat since v1.0 and still get amazed by its power. An Acrobat ACE since 1999