Quark XPress PDF quandry

MacAndy · Aug 9th, 2005, 12:48 PM

Quark XPress is throwing me a curve today, and I'm about to throw XPress so far across the room to join all those Microcrap products I don't use either.

I am exporting a single page with one 40Mb image in the background to a PDF.

I have done this a few million [ok, several hundred thousand] times in the past few years.

But today, today of all days with a magazine going to press tomorrow, it is screwing up.

I have the PDF prefs set to generate a high resolution PDF, yet although I have the JPEG option set at the highest option, and no downsampling, the PDF I get is only 212k in size.

When I turn the compression off, I end up with a 19.8Mb PDF.

I know, having done this xxxxxxx number of times, I should be getting a PDF at around 1.0Mb-4.0Mb at the absolute highest.

I have relaunched XPress to see if something was stuck in the system. May have to ditch a preference file or five to see if that does it.

Anyone else experiencing this problem?

Anyone else ready to pack it in with XPress?

I did some page updates in InDesign this morning, getting to think it truly is the way to go now. Wouldn't doubt if I were to become 100% proficient in InDesign by years' end.

RJaMmin · Aug 9th, 2005, 01:02 PM

Hi MacAndy;
Check under preferences in Quark for PDF & see what settings you have for Job Options.
You might also check your distiller settings. Hope this helps.

MacAndy · Aug 9th, 2005, 01:12 PM

Hi, it seems regardless of what my settings are it is not producing the PDF the way it should. If I select low res settings, I get low res. If I select compression but no downsampling I get low res. The only time I get high res is if I say no compression, but then the PDF is 19Mb in size. The resulting PDF should be between 1 and 4Mb in size per ALL of the magazine ad PDFs I have ever created in the past XX years. This is going straight out from XPress, no Distiller involved. It is not installed on this machine. May have to take home and get it to work, I only hope it DOES work tonight.

Aug 9th, 2005, 01:16 PM

I've been trying to talk most of our users at work into going with InDesign ... Quark is a nightmare to support. Phoning tech support is usually not much help, if any at all, and they charge silly prices for it. I hate ending up having to pay by the minute and sitting on hold while the "tech" asks all his colleagues to help him figure stuff out. I'd say that 90% of my calls I've ever placed to Quark support resulted in them either saying that the problem I'm having is impossible and can't happen, or that it's a "known issue" and they have no ETA on a fix. Since Quark has now also officially poo-pooed any "dot" updates it's pretty sad.

We have PDF problems with Quark constantly here, I'd recommend outputting a straight ps file, and then using Distiller to make the PDF (if that's an option for you).

bmovie · Aug 9th, 2005, 01:41 PM

Print the job as a postscript file then distill the job in Distiller.

hit print
under setup go to printer description pick Adobe pdf

then change the page size to custom to include the crop marks and leave page height to automatic and pick center horizontal in page positioning.

check your preview to see if you're in the margins.

once you got it in position,

click printer, now depending if you're running Panther or Tiger this will be different.
I'm using Tiger so the only thing you do next is click and hold on PDF and release on Save PDF as Postscript.

Then click print and print again for the last window and wait for the postcript file to be created.

Drop that in Distiller on desired setting and viola! PDF done.

I HATE QUARK, I never use the export as PDF....had too many problems that way.

Hope this works.

MacAndy · Aug 9th, 2005, 03:18 PM

Hi again, well, it appears to be happening to *THIS* file only. I have been creating PDFs from other documents, both lo- and hi-res, no problems. Another ad proof I did was 180k for the proof and 3.8Mb for the hi-res PDF.

PDF from XPress does work, and has worked for me for some time, albeit not XPress 6.0, 6.5 did fix the main issues.

Still, looks like I'm beating a dead horse here.

MacAndy · Aug 11th, 2005, 09:08 AM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by bmovie
	Print the job as a postscript file then distill the job in Distiller.

Hi, I am aware of the full and tedious way to produce PDFs ;-) Fact is, and I pointed this out to Quark Tech Support, the application shows a full range of available PDF options. There should be no excuse for this NOT to work from within XPress. It is much faster and more efficient when writing the PDFs, much fewer steps - AND - it worked before, why has it suddenly stopped working.

I can generate proof PDFs no problem. I can generate PDFs with no compression no problem - except that most printers don't like 40+MB single page PDFs, and we're talking a 108-page magazine here.

I set it up with Adobe PDF as the printer, but you can't just print the page, you have to click the damn Printer... button each time to invoke the file naming. That's lame.

We're at 2005 here, they've had twenty years of development and 5 years of Mac OS X and they're all still completely incapable of making these applications work properly.

Disgruntled, yes. Stressed - YES! I have three magazines in production and I'm fed up with problems that keep getting thrown at me when they should have been fixed long ago. And I let Quark know this is quite probably the last upgrade they'll ever get from me.

I'm tired.

wonderings · Aug 11th, 2005, 09:14 AM

We turned to the solution bmovie gave. We are using Quark 6.5 and just had to many problems with Quark for making pdf. Now we just create a postcript file, which comes out much quicker, then use distiller. It does not seem to take much more time for this compared to all the times Quark hangs while trying to make a pdf of larger files.

bmovie · Aug 11th, 2005, 10:19 AM

MacAndy, i share your frustration. I too have had deadlines and that is when Quark decides to Fup! on me.

I hope they get it right with version 7

I would switch to inDesign but don't feel like the learning curve and have WAY to many files invested in Quark.

Aug 11th, 2005, 10:46 AM

I think the fear of the learning curve is honestly one of the only things that are keeping Quark in business these days. We've had tons of issues with them as well. And of course we all get the same lovely support as always (next to none). I have threads on the quark support forum that have had hundreds and hundreds of views but not a single reply! (even though they say they monitor the forums and try to help as much as possible, heh).

Quite a few of our designers have taken the plunge on InDesign and any that have have not looked back at all, they say the curve isn't as bas as you might expect. I think I read that there's even a way to setup the hotkeys the same as quark in the latest version...