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Hi,

OK this is a bit of a printing nuisance and I'd be stoked if anyone can give me some advice:

I have this Indesign CS3 file, containing grayscale tiffs that have a spot colour applied in Indesign, and I export it to PDF so that I can email it to someone overseas. They are trying to print it (on a regular office colour laser) and keep getting these error messages like "drawing error" and "printing error".

I have re-saved the document, checked all the tiffs...

Does anyone know anything about this?
Thanks for your help!

what version of adobe acrobat reader are they using? I found a PC at my workplace the other day that was running a copy of acrobat reader 3!! I promptly uninstalled it and reinstalled it

but that's beside the point...

id be checking that first.

Try this.

Send the email back to yourself and see if you can read and print it. If it works on your computer the problem is most likely at the recipient's end. I do a Club newsletter and some members have problems reading it. Like the previous post, I have often found that you must have the latest copy of Adobe - V8 for some files to open properly.

Thanks for that, I've just asked the recipient to make sure they have the latest Acrobat version and I tried emailing it to myself - seems to be working fine.

Did I mention they're on a PC?

In an old version of the document I had pasted an Illustrator vector into Indesign. It was too big as a vector so it was pasted as an EPS. This EPS is no longer in the document but is it true that EPSs can cause printing havoc? Is there any way to work around this as I'd actually like to have this vector image in the document eventually.

Thanks!

Yes EPS can cause an issue with printing. The printer must be of a type to handle EPS files. I won't go into the details of EPS here but if you are copying a file over to PDF it is best to have any graphics in either .tif or .jpg as these convert with no issues.

If I do any vector drawings in say CorelDraw (Win) and leave them in the default .cdr format they don't convert in my pdf writer so I export these as .tif.

You could try a file convertor programme if you don't have the original application. I am not sure what ones are available for Mac but try Google and do search.

Ok, thanks I'll try exporting as a tiff or something else. I know that my pre-press knowledge could use a boost, can you point me in to right direction to any helpful web sites where I can learn a bit more about the offset printing process, from a graphic design point of view?

cheers

Glad to help where I can. With nearly all printing nowadays I use PDF as most print shops prefer this. If you export your file as an EPS you have to include your fonts as wells as a lot of other data. You need to note that each font type is actually different. One printer told me he would have to carry over 100 different Times New Roman font. Most print shops love PDF as they do not have to do anything to the file.

If they do want EPS - I have one sign shop that does require this - I do my file in Corel (We only use Win at Work), save as tif and send to my graphic artist who re-works the file using Illustrator on Mac. It is easy for him to do an EPS file and send on.

If you need to learn more about using EPS there is heaps available on the internet but unless you are going to do a lot of specialized graphics I would stick to saving as PDF or tif.

At home I am using Pages and Pixelmator for most of my work. I don't do much vector on the Mac as
yet.