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PDF weirdo
#7256 01/04/10 07:42 PM
Joined: Aug 2009
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Small publishing company. We convert our finished pages to PDF, burn them onto a CD, a courier picks up the CD and the art-work (belt+braces). That's how our publication gets printed by The Printer-Man.

Before The Massive Migration Away From OS9 (see posts passim) we PDF'd our finished pages using Adobe Acrobat. Er, that got lost in the migration. No worries, I thought, OSX does Print-to-PDF.

Fortunately, one day ahead of Press Day, I emailed some test pages to The PrinterMan.

He reported back that our new PDFs had all the apostrophes stripped out. Fortunately he noticed this from a headline......and he said he fixed it at his end by converting my PDF to an EPS file. Apostrophes restored.

He then couriered me over a copy of some software called Jaws pdf creator, which I've just installed, and made a PDF using that instead of the in-built function, and have emailed the result back to him.

There's not much time to go on this one: tomorrow night, Tuesday, is Press Night = DEADLINE.

Questions: has anyone here heard of this Jaws s/ware? Why does the in-built OSX (Tiger) print-as-PDF function perform badly compared with Acrobat? (apostrophes stripped out)?

Sorry to be a pesky nuisance. Thanks for any knowledgeable replies.

Re: PDF weirdo
Bensheim #7259 01/04/10 07:49 PM
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I'd like to look at that. can you put up a copy of the 'before' and 'after' files for me to download and play with?

Doesn't have to be the entire thing, just a page or clip or so that demonstrates the issue.


I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: PDF weirdo
Virtual1 #7263 01/04/10 08:45 PM
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OK. How?

This forum doesn't support images. Nor messages.

Over to you, but I'm thinking all you'll see is a headline with and without an apostrophe.........

confused

Re: PDF weirdo
Bensheim #7269 01/04/10 11:38 PM
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JAWS is the PDF maker that is built in to QuarkXPress. Like the Mac PDF maker, it has some weird quirks and problems; really, the only reliable PDF creator for press I have yet seen is Adobe Acrobat.

What font are you using? The mysterious disappearing quote mark sounds like a font encoding issue; I bet it happens with some fonts but not others. (I am assuming they are "smart" (curly) quotes that vanish; is that true?)


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Re: PDF weirdo
tacit #7290 01/05/10 03:25 PM
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Originally Posted By: tacit
JAWS is the PDF maker that is built in to QuarkXPress. Like the Mac PDF maker, it has some weird quirks and problems; really, the only reliable PDF creator for press I have yet seen is Adobe Acrobat.


You know so much! I agree about Acrobat but have you seen the price of a licence?

Quote:
What font are you using? The mysterious disappearing quote mark sounds like a font encoding issue; I bet it happens with some fonts but not others. (I am assuming they are "smart" (curly) quotes that vanish; is that true?)


Helvetica. Bog standard Helvetica. Nope, not quotes, apostrophes. Like this: Bensheim's Long Journey

Re: PDF weirdo
Bensheim #7296 01/05/10 05:12 PM
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Admittedly Acrobat is not cheap, but in your situation it may well be cost effective. Given your office setup you only need to install it on one Mac and there are at least a couple of ways that everyone in the office can share the single Acrobat PDF printer or let a single server in the office "Distill" all your PDF documents.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: PDF weirdo
Bensheim #7298 01/05/10 05:47 PM
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First, I am with Virtual1. This thing seems to be very strange. Just did a test on a document. Conversion to PDF through print-to-PDF preserved all the 5 apostrophes in a Helvetica text generated in MS Word 2008; Word 2004 behaves the same way from previous experience. Looks like this may be related to the original word processor program. Maybe you need to change that.
For your info, a professional edition of Acrobat is less than $200 in US. I would look in Amazon or Ebay; you may be OK even with a previous version.


Alex
3.1 GHz 13" MacBook Pro 2015, 8 GB RAM, OS 10.11.2, Office 2011, TimeWarner Cable
2.8 GHz Xeon Mac Pro 2010, 16 GB RAM, OS 10.11.2, Office 2011, LAN

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