PDFs Placed into CS4 Documents May Drop Characters When Exported to PDF.
If you’re exporting documents from InDesign CS4 to PDF there’s an issue that has recently come to light in the User to User forum that you should be aware of.
If you’ve placed PDFs created by Quark 7 or earlier or distilled using Distiller 8 or earlier, some characters in those PDFs may be dropped when viewing or Printing the PDF from Acrobat or Reader version 8 and earlier. Adobe has recently acknowledged this problem and issued a technote on it.
The reason for the problem is:
The fonts in the original PDF are embedded as symbolic fonts. Acrobat and PDF Library 8.x and earlier are not capable of correctly rendering symbolic fonts if the font encoding doesn’t contain the glyph names for every glyph in the font.
The workarounds as outlined include using the PDF/X-4 standard when exporting or exporting the PDF to postcript from Acrobat distilling it.
The most disturbing aspect of this is that almost all users of CS4 are likely to have Acrobat 9 Professional installed and when viewing or preflighting their PDFs there everything appears fine.
Until this is actually fixed it may be wise to install an earlier version of Reader or Acrobat in order to look at any exported PDFs.
More and more problems are sneaking through in CS4 and coming to light. There seems to be just as many things broken as there are added. I said earlier, I can’t update to CS4 because of the Style Mapping problem.
Thanks for pointing this out. It will be handy for troubleshooting other work coming through.
Eugene, could you link me to some reference to your “style mapping” problem?
I find CS4 brilliant. At first, it looked the same as CS3, but it has hidden abilities that greatly exceed CS3.
All software (and hardware) goes through a period of “teething troubles”, because developers simply cannot anticipate everything that users will do with it. The best thing is to have lots of users, who use the software in novel ways… Ideally, when users find problems, they can easily communicate with developers, who then quickly repair the problems.
But even that “best thing” is a compromise. The developers have to strike a balance between producing a hugely innovative thing that doesn’t work at all, and a hugely conservative thing that works perfectly but does not advance beyond the previous version.
In my opinion, CS4 strikes that balance very well!
Well it worked fine in Cs3. I downloaded a trial of Cs4 and it’s broked.
https://www.theindesigner.com/blog/restore-style-mapping-presets-report-this-bug
I don’t know why it’s broken, who broke it or why they are reluctant to fix it. All I know is it worked before, it’s not working now and I need it. I’m sure there are others?
I’m slightly annoyed. I expect all the old features to work. Like in CS3 gravity didn’t work. I’m sure there was more, but it’s just an example.
I’d just like to add to more the reason I’m annoyed. Simply because Adobe charge an insane amount for this software, outside of the US. And some really important elements simply don’t work. And these may be elements that worked beofre, or new elements. But it seems like nothing was tested before release. That’s just how it seems to me. And the post and theindesigner.com frustrates me. It really does.
If it was an upgrade, can you not simply import Word content into a CS3 document, then close, save and open it up in CS4? — Even if it works, it’s a funny way of proceeding, I admit!
I’m still working with CS3 as much as CS4, because other freelancers still have CS3. I would love to have used cross-references the other day, but I knew the other guy who was working on the same book couldn’t. He is as annoyed as you are about the pricing difference.
Now though I’m not just annoyed about the pricing. I could live with that. But I can’t live with features just not working as expected. In CS3 gravity didn’t work, but I didn’t use that much – but I wanted to. CS3 was fantastic in the introduction of numbering and variables. And CS4 brings cross references. I know I should upgrade. But I can’t, I just can’t pay for new features where old features don’t work. It does not make sense.
I’m happily using both, on the same computer, with no apparent conflicts. There are some features that didn’t work in CS3 that are now working in CS4. At least when you upgrade you get to keep the older version.
FYI I’ve also seen this problem with art saved out of Photoshop and Illustrator as PDF. It’s ugly.
Mike,
It’s not good. I fell in love with CS2 and then CS3 threw me a lovering. And now I’m in limbo. I’m really unimpressed.
If anyone using CS3 and Style Mapping bought CS4 and use CS4 and can’t Style Map, then Adobe should fix it or give a refund. No excuses. Whether it’s 1 person or a million people.
Adobe should fix every problem that doesn’t work in Cs4, Cs3 etc. and offer updates for it. It doesn’t matter that 1 person needs it or a thousand or a million. It’s the fact that it worked in earlier/future versions and it doesn’t work in their version. Geez they are paid enough for it.
The style mapping works. It’s the presets that don’t.
What Bob said. I think everyone that commented on that site thought style mapping is broken. It’s not. It’s just the saving the preset that doesn’t work.
So it’s broken then guys. Sorry but I should have been clearer. It doesn’t remember the presets. That means it’s broken. I have about 10 – 15 styles that need to be mapped for about 25 – 30 articles. And the presets should work. So CS4 isn’t for me until it’s fixed.
If the alternative to using a preset is simply to import the Word document, then delete the imported Word styles and replace them with InDesign styles, it should be easy enough to write a script for it.
I might even have a go myself!
I’ve just discovered the stye-mapping problem in CS4 InDesign – fortunately on a demo version. I’m with Eugene on this one. I use style-mapping in CS3 and it saves me a huge amount of time and work. Without the style-mapping (and the fact that it is the pre-set saving rather than the actual mapping itself which is lost is a moot point – it renders stye-mapping useless), CS4 is dead in the water for me. Until Adobe have fixed it I’m staying with CS3. And talk about scripting fixes is a joke. At the prices Adobe charges for its software it really ought to work straight out of the box. Can you imagine any other product manufacturer getting away with such poor production qualities? Imagine Adobe built motorcars…
Tim, London
Tim, While it may render it useless to you, you can consider yourself lucky that you receive Word files where it’s an issue.
Most of the Word files I get are all manually overridden normal style.
While I agree this is something that should be fixed, I think for the majority of users it’s not the dealbreaker that it is for someone like you.
OK, this is definitely a bug. And this bug occurs on Mac AND Windows.
Here’s how to reproduce it:
1. create an InDesign document (doesn’t have to be CS4)
2. print it to Adobe PDF (ie. Distiller) using the following settings:
a. paper size (on “setup” tab) = “custom”
b. at least one set of printers marks checked (eg. crop marks)
c. set Distiller to create a PDF X/1a:2001 compliant pdf
3. place the PDF into another InDesign CS4 (has to be CS4) document
a. hold down [Shift] to show import options
b. the crop to “Art”, “Trim” and “Bleed” options will be greyed out
There is no way to place the PDF without the printers marks that were created at step 2.b.
+++++++++++++++++++
What I’ve described above is our workflow for placing ads in our monthly newspaper. It’s a workflow which is extremely fault-tolerant, and which we have used sucessfully from the begining of 2006 (using CS2 and CS3). And this is why we will be attempting to return CS4 for a refund, unless Adobe can fix this bug before we begin work on our next issue.
Bryce Amner.
Both the placed PDF to PDF export font issue, and the Word Import Preset custom style mapping issue, are both solved in the 6.0.4 update. See the release notes for items #2309754, and 2335625, respectively. Many other great fixes in there too.
——————————————————
An important update to the InCopy and InDesign products has been released today!
To install the update, choose Help > Updates from any Adobe CS4 application, or navigate to the Adobe Updater and launch it:
Mac: /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Utilities/Updater6/Adobe Updater.app
Win: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Updater6\Adobe_Updater.exe
You can also download the updates from Adobe.com at the following locations:
InCopy Mac: https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=30&platform=Macintosh
InCopy Win: https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=30&platform=WIndows
InDesign Mac: https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=31&platform=Macintosh
InDesign Win: https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=31&platform=WIndows
Release notes are here: https://www.adobe.com/go/id6_readme_en