Expert: Ran - 10/27/2009

Question
QUESTION: Hi Ran,
I use CorelDraw X3.
My Corel document size is 8.5 x 11.0 inches. I "Publish to PDF", but Adobe Acrobat (version 9.0) prints my image slightly smaller than actual.

It's as if Adobe is taking a slightly larger "picture" of my Corel screen and then shrinking it to fit on the 8.5 x 11.0in page.

In my PDF when I click "Print" and look at the preview it says "Document: 8.8 x 11.3in" and "Paper: 8.5 X 11.0in".  I think this is the problem, but don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Also puzzling: it only does this with some of my documents, and not with others.

Can you help? Thank you.






ANSWER: Hi Donna

Sorry for the delay replying. I don't work weekends and in the rainy UK we're 5-6 hours adrift.

CorelDraw produces a .pdf exactly the same size as your page. There are no "size" settings in the Publish to PDF dialog and the only way to produce a different size .pdf is to change your page size in CorelDraw.

Therefore I think this is an Adobe issue, not CorelDraw.

I find that Adobe Reader loves to guess what you want and opts for amateur home-user settings until you change them. In its Print dialog are horrific options like Page Scaling and Auto-Rotate and Center, they makes my blood run cold. Be a pro!...make sure all this crap is turned off!

You mention Document and Paper sizes within Adobe's Print dialog. The Document setting is coming from the size of the objects in your .cdr file, so if it says "11.3in" I'm thinking you have one or more objects outside the page area in CorelDraw. These won't appear in the .pdf but I think you may find that's why you're getting this oversize value.

I hope this helps, please let me know how you get on!


---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: You are right, I did have some objects just outside the page area and when I scoot them out of the way Adobe uses the right size for the document.  

But this brings me to another question. When I'm in Corel and click File, Publish to PDF, Settings, one of the tabs is Issues. I get a red circle with an X through it: "Not all characters will display in the final PDF document."  

I did a little research and found if I go to the Objects tab and click Unicode instead of ASCII, the error message goes away. What does that error message mean and why does it go away if I choose ASCII?

I have been publishing to PDF from Corel for a couple of years and all of my characters have been printing as far as I know, and I never noticed the error before (although it might have been there).

Do I need to fix this error every time I Publish to PDF?.
If so, can I change the default to Unicode?  
Would this error have anything to do with my original problem?

Thank you for your kind help.


Answer
Hi again Donna

Unicode is a massive character set which is designed to be able to include all of the world's languages. It requires two bytes (16 bits) per character, whereas ASCII requires just one byte (8 bits). The West still tends to use the standard ASCII character set, which allows 256 different characters. When we want to use some odd symbol, we generally switch over to a different font file, such as Wingdings. The people developing Unicode are optimistic that we'll all be using it one day.

Not all characters are identical in all ASCII character sets though. In the past I've been confounded by bullet points (Alt+0149) which vanish when I switch to another font, and I would guess that this is the kind of thing the warning is for. However this would only be a potential problem if you did not embed your fonts in your PDF and it was subsequently viewed on a PC which didn't have the same fonts installed. It's unlikely to affect common characters (0-9, a-Z etc) but your bullets might change or vanish, for example.

So I think the warning is unlikely to affect most of your work but it might be worth experimenting by typing all of your unusual characters in a row and then seeing which of them come out properly. And switching to Unicode on a finished document seems a bit excessive and might open up other issues, I don't really know, sorry! There is probably a default setting somewhere in the Options dialog! Best of luck!

I don't think this has anything to do with your original problem!