Dpi Media Group -- Prepare PDF for Printing

PDF has established itself as a standard file format across many platforms & systems that helps designers, document creators & alike to retain the layouts, quality & colors in the printing outputs no matter where they go.

At Dpi Media Group, our workflow has been entirely based on PDF for years, as this is the "Next Step" in the future evolution of traditional and digital printing. A common & popular standard such as PDF helps to save time & money for our clients while it would integrate natually into our workflow / printers, thus speeding up the accuracy, production & turn-around time.

In the year of 2006, Microsoft would implement a new standard in the Windows Longhorn/Vista to compete with PDF, called "Metro", which would try to achieve the same objective: making documents to look the same no matter where you go. Until this new format, which based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), earns its way to the mainstream, we're currently left with the postscript-based PDF as the best & only way to "freeze" the look of a document as it was originally created.

Here's one of our favourite methods for making an excellent PDF for printing:

You MUST have Adobe Acrobat - the FULL SUITE (not the free downloadable Reader version). If you don't, see the last paragraph below or go here for a free PDF converter (not made by Adobe).
Select "Acrobat PDF" as your printer, as well as the PPD associated with it (if available in some applications like QuarkXpress or Adobe PageMaker), and in the "Properties" menu of the printer, configure the Acrobat settings as followed:
1. Under the "Images" tab:
  - Turn OFF all "downsampling" options for both color & BW images
  - Use "ZIP" as the compression method for all images
  - "Anti-alias" greyscale images
2. Under the "Fonts" tab:
  - Embed ALL fonts and turn OFF "Font Subsetting" option
  - Clear everything in the "Never embed these fonts" box
3. Under "Color Management":
  - Turn OFF "Color Management
You should save all these settings as a unique profile name so that it can be quickly recalled next time. If you want all the above options to be the default for future, you should go into the "Control Panel" > "Printers" > "Adobe PDF" & select the profile that you've just create above in BOTH "Preferences" & "Printer Defaults" menu.
Lastly, if you're using QuarkXpress, in Quark's "Print menu" & under the "Output" tab, point the "Printer Colors" to "RGB" with the "Resolution" of 1200dpi, "Frequency" of 100lpi. Note that if the colors of the printed sample do not turn out as expected, you can try to play with other settings in the "Printer Colors" (ie. "CMYK" or "As Is")
Now click "Print" & after a few seconds or minutes (depending on how big your original file is), Adobe Acrobat will prompt you where to save the PDF. Choose a drive, folder, anywhere you want to save the output PDF file.

After you click "Save" & if it's the first time (since turning on your computer) or if it's been idle for a while (usually more than 10 minutes), Adobe Acrobat will take at least 5-10 minutes just to "initialize" before actually process the conversion. The waiting time may be longer if you have a lot of fonts loaded in your computer system or high-resolution images in your document.

That's about it ! Let us know if you have any questions ...