Expert: Glen Demers - 9/12/2008

Question
Hi,
We are doing a large photo-bio book with approx. 400 pages. Lots of text and lots of pics. The book is separated into chapters of which there are eight.
I have had so much trouble exporting to pdf I am about ready to shoot something. Because the files are large and there is a lot of information in them it takes forever to export and get to the point where INDD finally bails out on me...so the process starts again and again. Literally it can take all day to print one chapter.
The chapters have a lot of images in them, from psd to jpeg to tiff and there are .eps files as well. Unfortunately we took over the project so some of the "standards" I would have used up front were not in play so we have a lot more variables to work with. In addition we use INDD drop shadows pretty much on every image, and other special effects. I know it is a complex file, but in the interest of time (and lost money), if I could narrow it down to only having to fix one or two things that would help. For instance, should I replace the .eps files with psd? Should I make sure all the images are the same format? If so, I need psd to maintain transparency, is that a problem? There are so many variables and the file(s) are so big that I can't afford to do the trial and error type of trouble-shooting so I'm hoping you have a logical order to begin checking the files. Lastly, if there is a way to export individual pages as pdfs, I can reassemble them in Acrobat and that just might be the work-around I need given the time frames we have.
At any rate, thank you in advance for your help!

Answer
Hi Stephen,

The only way to export pages to individual pdf's is to create a script.
What I would do is to print to .ps files and distill them separately.
You could print batches of pages and create a watched folder to drop them into for distilling. If a batch of say 12 pages fails you can print four files of 3 pages etc, until you isolate the problem page. Sometimes distilling them one at a time is the cure.
If you could replace the eps images with tiff's that would help but mainly with all the transparency used in the psd's and drop shadows you'll be better off making pdf's in a two step process.

Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

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