Conflicts with Lulu

That would be the LAST work around I would ever consider using. Going to a Microsoft product to fix something, talk about irony !!!! ewwww.

But if I am not mistaken, doing a Print to PDF in MS Word on a Mac hands the PDF creation off to the OS. Would that not then have the same issues as before?

I was more refering to the exporting to a MS product before the PDF creation. Often exporting from one program to another causes major changes in the document.

Use transparanies as an example. Photoshop can support transparancies, so can Adobe Illustrator and In-Design as well as Acrobat. But try to RIP or Render a transparancy without flattening it - can't be done. Flattening, as simple as it is, will often change the colour (slightly) and appearance of a graphic as it attempts to map the new flattened colour within the gamut range.

So if something that must be done such as flattening at the RIPPING stage can change colours to a tif file, imagine what could happen when a file with mega fonts, graphics, colours etc is exported to a different type of editing program:

As well, MS word doesn't support process colours, pantones or other printing standards, so the eventual resulting PDF will be a nightmare for printers as text will be RGB black and where the colours used should be process they are not.

Point taken, and since I am not a graphic artist I readily accept your comments. However, I think my point still stands. The tendency of this thread has been to locate the problem with the way the Apple PDF engine creates PDFs. But if that is so, then printing to PDF from MS Word, which uses the Apple PDF engine in the OS, should still have the same issues since that is the same engine as used by Pages when you export to PDF from it. Thus, if the source of the problem has been correctly identified, that method should not work. Hence my puzzlement at the success of the method. Cheers!

Let's say that it may be how Pages uses Apple's PDF engine. Each program decides what shall be sent to the printer. To take an example, many web browsers do not send page background pictures to the printer by default. You see one thing and print a slightly different one.

It is possible, even likely, that Pages and Word do not send the same kind of information for printing. And it is possible that the information Word sends makes it possible for Apple's PDF engine to create Lulu-compatible files.

Salient point, and perhaps the correct answer to my puzzlement. Cheers!

I wonder (I actually am not sure) if the issue is an Apple or Pages one. From my experiences in printing, I've found certain programs write better and cleaner PDF's than others. In-Design, for instance, exports PDF's in magnificent form, while a similar program, Quark Xpress, seems to fail in that department. Yet, assuming both are from the same Mac, using the same options, and same engine, why would one be better than the other?

Maybe this is like asking the meaning of life????

Doesn't InDesign illustrate it quite well? Go into the export function for PDF in InDesign and see all the options you get when you save the file. Each program will send different pieces of information, and they sometimes correspond to different settings in those dialogues.

Yes In-Design is very good in that respect. Quark can do the same, by simply creating an Acrobat Distiller setting-file (all the options you refer to in In-Design are there plus many more) and choosing that setting in Quark when exporting or printing to pdf. Yet even so, Quark PDf's are no where near as good as In-Design. All of which brings me back to my query of whether it's Apple or something else.

You're question is actually answered aways above in this thread. The issue--after talking with people at Lulu, and doing a lot of research through other forums, is Apple's PDF engine.

The reason InDesign works is because it's an Adobe product that natively uses the Adobe PDF engine, which correctly creates font subsets. The Apple PDF engine makes compliant PDFs, but for some reason it does not subset fonts in the same way--and the method they use doesn't work for digital commercial printers.

This is the core issue. A document I made in pages produced 88 differrent subsetted vesions of the same font, while the identical document in InDesign only had one font subset. Note that these are NOT different fonts. Pages subsets a new font for every variation of the font, even font sizes as far as I can tell.

Any program that hands its PDF creation off to OS X PDF maker will have this problem. Any program that uses exclusively the Adobe PDF machine will work. Because the issue is font subsetting it is possible that someone might create a document -- using a single font with no variations -- and have the OS X PDF maker create a file that will work on Lulu. It's my suspicion that this is the case for those few reported cases of files that work.

Now, I haven't tried a Pages document in the last three months. I've been using InDesign exclusively for stuff that goes to Lulu, so Lulu may have figured out a way to fix it--but I haven't heard of the fix yet. Perhaps the pdf engine will be better in Leopard, due out this spring. Until then, get yourself a copy of InDesign and everything will work fine.

Powerbook G4 15 Mac OS X (10.4.1)

Well Marc, that makes a lot of sense. The system I run (pre-press) is based on Acrobat and Distiller. I don't think I've ever had to create a PDF that relies soley upon the OS. If it's not an adobe product, then I usually write a PS file and manually distill it.

Your reasoning might explain a lot about some PDF files I get from designers and why I see the subsetting so random. However, even with these files I don't get many rendering issues. Perhaps the Rip (Agfa Apogee) works about the font subsetting issue you mentioned.

Lulu will accept a Pages-created PDF file if you use the Save As PDF-X option instead of the regular Save As PDF option.

I have printed several books on Lullu, from small (20 page) to over 100 pages, by taking the PDF file produced by Pages and running it through a program called PStill by Stone Design. It "reformulates" the PDF, and fixes the font subsetting problem. Although not free, it's a whole lot cheaper than Acrobat. (You can get a free copy of Acrobat with a Fujitsu SnapScan scanner - I wish I'd known that then.)

Just so's you know.

Ben

Eureka! I think -- or at least I hope -- that you've solved a problem that's been troubling a number of people.

I downloaded PStill today and tried it: it seems to do the trick. lulu.com happily accepted the PDF that I created by running Pages' normal PDF output through PStill. All the subsetted fonts were gone, replaced by single embedded fonts. Plus it gave me a huge amount of control over other parameters such as downsampling, JPEG compression, etc.

I've sent my order in, and I'm waiting for the results. I'll report back here and on the lulu forums if it works.

The problem was solved for me by exporting from Pages to postscript and sending the poscript file to Lulu. They then automatically generate a pdf from that .ps file on their own site...

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=772672&tstart=0

Hopefully this will be helpful to someone.

Bo