Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Why do PDFs sometimes lose images when printed?

Good Morning!

Yesterday I came across a problem with a pdf sent in. PDFs are supposed to be print ready most of the time, notice I say most of the time.  Anything can happen with any type of files on a computer! LOL. When I opened the PDF it looked great. I use Macintosh and opened the file in Acrobat 8.0 Professional. I printed a laser and all still looks great.

Then I sent the file to our digital press, when the file was printed the images and background dropped out. The digital press has Acrobat 6.0 on it and since it is PC based I assumed that was what the problem was.

When my boss opened the file on his PC, he has Acrobat 7.0 and viewed, it showed the same thing with the images and background dropped out. I went back to Acrobat on my computer and opened the pdf, re-saved the file out and sent to the digital press. Everything looks great! Hopefully that will fix the problem.

I am not sure if the difference in the programs have caused the problem with the file, so I will try to investigate this further. If anyone has ever seen this happen and know exactly why please let me know. I do know that when I re-saved the PDF file from Acrobat 8.0 Professional, everything showed up on the file at the digital press.

I think sometimes when you save a high resolution pdf, and you do not check the OPI button it causes the images to disappear with sent to another computer. But since we have no idea how the file was created and what program it was sent from, there are a number of possible reasons why the file did this. But at least re-saving it solved the problem! Yeah!

Have a great day!

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