Chapter Fourteen. Acrobat Production Tips

In 1991, Dr. John Warnock, one of the cofounders of Adobe Systems, proposed Project Camelot, in which he suggested using the graphics and imaging operators of PostScript to create portable documents that could be displayed and printed on any computer, regardless of the originating application. These documents would contain all the resources necessary to represent the original document for display and printing. Images and vector art would be crisp. Regardless of operating system or computer platform, fonts would be embedded, ensuring that text would be readable and line breaks would be preservedeven if recipients didn't have the same fonts as the document's creator. Sound familiar?

Thus, what came to be known as Adobe Acrobat was intended to create what might be called digital carbon copies for office document interchange and storage. But a funny thing happened in the graphic arts world. We discovered that converting stubborn documents to Portable Document Format (PDF) files often enabled us to salvage nightmare jobs. For example, while Microsoft Word allows you to add festive clip art and other decorative bits such as Word Art to documents, it's really intended for word processing. Turning a Word file into something suitable for printing in two spot colors might require that you generate a PDF, then open that PDF in Adobe Acrobat Professional and use the PitStop plug-in from Enfocus to deconstruct the artwork, fix the things that fell apart during the conversion, and then assign the correct printing colors. It may seem like the long way around, but at least you'd have something that could be printed as intended.

Fast-forward to current day. Many publications and print service providers request that you submit your jobs as PDF files to eliminate the need to send a combination of page-layout files, support artwork files, and the necessary fonts. While this simplifies job submission, it also shifts the responsibility for more of the job's quality control to the shoulders of the person making the PDF file. That would be you.