Expert: Ken Black - 10/22/2009

Question
Dear Mr. Black,
I am a seasoned graphics professional who has been working as a desktop publisher in recent years.  My frequent tasks involve preparing highly detailed MS Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel), regularly (heavily-)laden with accompanying graphics.  Now, while quite well versed in creating crisp, clean PDF copies of documents from (Adobe) Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop, my frequent (80%) PDF results from Office documents are below standard, specifically the logo graphics.  For example:  An MS Word multi-page document with inserted elements - 1)JPEG or TIFF photos or graphic.  2)JPEG, (transparent) TIFF, Vector/EPS, or GIF formatted logos. 3) WordArt banners.  Frequent results after creating (Adobe) PDF of document = a) Photos look fine, regardless of format.  b) WordArt text looks fine and crisp.  c) Ditto for Vector/EPS (which normally look fuzzy on the Word doc) and (often times) GIF logos .  d) JPEGs and TIFFs have a boxy/pixellated appearance. No matter what PDF setting or adjustment I use, the ("d") logos always appear this way, botching up a day or two's worth of work.  I now always search the Web for Vectored/EPS copies of logos since the results are great...but, I'm not always lucky to find the logo I need.  Sometimes, borderlines get truncated as well.  Have you ever come across these problems and are Microsoft applications inherently problematic (nee evil) when creating PDFs?  I welcome your comments and advice! Thank you in advance for your assistance.  - Marco

Answer
Hi Marco,

Are MS applications problematic when creating PDFs? YES!!!

I have stopped entirely at using the Convert to PDF functions (which may or may not even be available any longer) and create pdfs by Printing to File (.prn) and using Acrobat Distiller for the conversion.
This seems to have solved most problems. Of course, the ultimate desire is to never have to use a Microsoft application to do graphic design, only letters, slide-show presentations or spreadsheets.

When printing to file, there will be an advanced button in the print dialog window, in these settings will be an output resolution, set it to 2400 x 2400 and you should get better results. This is of course in addition to choosing high resolution settings in the printer properties. The printer that should be selected will be Adobe pdf. Create the .prn (Microsofts version of .ps or postcript) and then using Distiller, choose a high resolution job option and let it do the conversion.

Providing that the graphics you have placed are all high resolution to begin with and are not scaled beyond their effective resolution (i.e. 150% or more), you should get a better result.

The exception to this is Powerpoint. Powerpoint does not like high resolution graphics. It operates very slowly when they are used and when Powerpoint attempts any exporting for print tends to give low resolution representations. Again, creating a postscript and then distilling sometimes will solve this and in others it is just to no avail.

Thanks,

Ken Black

www.bestprintingonline.com