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RE: PDFs from Word show differently in Reader 9 or Acrobat Pro 9
Subject:RE: PDFs from Word show differently in Reader 9 or Acrobat Pro 9 From:Tony Chung <tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:51:56 -0800
I have reason to use both methods to create PDFs (printing to a
postscript driver, and directly to Adobe). I've seen a lot of font and
alignment problems when distilling a .ps file. Haven't seen missing
borders yet.
-----Original Message----- From: McLauchlan, Kevin
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 8:53 AM
Hey all. This might be old hat, but I wasn't previously aware and one of
our QA guys just pointed it out to me.
Our company has had Win XP Pro as our standard desktop OS, and MS Office
2003 as our standard Office suite.
Some folks now have Office 2007 (not I, nor anyone at my location).
I create a certain document in Word 2003, and when it's been through the
review mill, I generate a PDF for posting on the company website.
My habit, from many years of using various tools to create docs, is to
print my Word (or Frame, or other...) file to a .PRN file, using "Adobe"
as my printer instance. Then I run the resulting file through Acrobat
Distiller to produce the final PDF.
The document in question had sat around for several days with no new
change requests, so I generated my PDF and sent it to QA. Because I had
been on vacation for a couple of days, the QA guy had taken the Word
file and used Word 2007's "Safe as PDF" to generate his own PDF (to test
the website link, etc.). He noticed that MY version had the top border
of some tables missing, while his version (from the identical Word file)
had the top borders properly displayed. ERK!!
I usually open PDFs in Acrobat Pro. I did so. The two files (my PDF and
his PDF) looked identical to me - and I was about to say so... Then I
thought to view in Adobe Reader 9 instead of Acrobat Pro. Aha! The tops
of several of my tables are indeed nekkid! His are fully
clothed. Egad!
So much for my bullet-proof production method.
By comparison, though, his file was four times larger than mine for the
same document... so apparently the top border on three tables needs a
whole lotta kilobytes.
Just for fun, I opened HIS file in Acrobat Pro 9 and ran the "Advanced >
PDF optimize" function on it. The file shrank by half - leaving it still
twice the size of my original
to-PRN-then-through-Distiller file, but even after optimizing, his PDF
still had tops on the offending tables. So, some Distiller option must
strip table top borders (just some, not all). I don't recall seeing any
options labelled as such in the Distiller interface...
All of that to say, view/validate your PDFs in Adobe Reader, and not
just Acrobat Pro, 'cuz your customers are more likely to have Reader
than Acrobat.
Kevin McLauchlan
Senior Technical Writer
SafeNet, Inc.
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