Comments on: The Ugly Truth Behind PDFs and AIs

By: Tav Campbell

Tav Campbell — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:57:25 +0000

Does this mean that when InDesign sends an .ai file to print, it is really just sending the PDF part of the file to print? If that is true, I had better start taking more notice of what the PDF settings are in my .ai files.

By: racy_rick

racy_rick — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:03:11 +0000

Something needs to be done about this. PDF has just become a bog standard because it works. Now it is starting to suck, not because pdf sucks, but because acrobat sucks. All of these features and more holes and problems.

We need something like svg that can handle the inclusion of everything else (video, audio, etc).

Nextstep has postscript as its display language and it worked really well. OS X really takes the best of the pdf stuff. I mean, print straight to a pdf from anything at any time. Now that is slick.

Now if acrobat could get back to fitting on a floppy!

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 17:02:36 +0000

More info on Illustrator vs. PDF (editing PDFs in Illustrator, details on how an .ai file is a .pdf and how it's not) are in this interesting post by Leonard Rosenthol on the Acrobat User blog.

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 15:16:44 +0000

A, it’s hard to know. Do you have View > Display Quality > High enabled? That’s the only way to really ensure that you’re seeing what’s really in the PDF.

Note that I’ve heard a number of complaints about what people see in PDFs in Acrobat, and the solution is often to turn off some of the anti-aliasing features in Acrobat’s Preferences dialog box. Acrobat is constantly trying to make stuff look better, but sometimes it ends up fooling you with artifacts that don’t really exist in the PDF.

By: A. MacNeil

A. MacNeil — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 03:51:53 +0000

I’d like to know WHY it is that everytime I import an AI file into ID, that contains, for instance, .25 or smaller faint grey lines (outlines/boxes, etc), they appear perfectly in the application, but appear black or slightly thicker as a pdf? Is there something I’m missing? I’ve toyed around with this now for hours. The pdf isn’t supposed to be printed, just viewed from another computer! Can somebody PLEASE help me?!!!

By: Timothy Macking

Timothy Macking — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:49:14 +0000

Blending modes in InDesign, a dream? Maybe that is coming in CS3 but I have my doubts. If we had cross platform consistency we’d be using Microsoft, right? Tim Macking MCSE

By: Mordy Golding

Mordy Golding — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:15:30 +0000

Since we're on the topic of cross-applications consistency, I thought you might find this post interesting: http://rwillustrator.blogspot.com/2007/01/c-vs-cvc-battle-of-pantone-proportions.html

By: Peter Truskier

Peter Truskier — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 18:52:04 +0000

“Any other file format faux pas that need fixing?”

I would offer two, though one of them is not really a file format issue:

1. It would really be great if InDesign supported Photoshop’s blening modes, not just alpha transparency.

2. It would also be very nice if the text engines in all the applications were sufficiently the same to allow copying and pasting editable text objects between them.

By: woz

woz — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:30:15 +0000

Ah, okay. Like synchonising the schortcuts for illu and indi for example.

By: Erika Heggie

Erika Heggie — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 18:49:28 +0000

It’s called a suite for a reason, there should absolutely be more “exchange” features between ID and PS/AI (and vice verse). I can understand why a few of these suggestions might not be feasible, but some seem easy enough to implement, such as the copy/paste and import/export features David mentions.

For example. Create a massive multiple layer Illustrator file. Layers, sub-layers, get crazy. Export as a PSD with “create layers” selected (be brave and select both of the editability options). Open the resulting file in Photoshop. Layers, sub-layers, even text layers (gasp, formatted live text!) have come through, almost perfectly translated. That is true application interchange. Nobody’s asking for full round-tripping file exchange, but for more options getting files from one place to the next.

The Illustrator engineers and the InDesign engineers should really go out for tequila shots. I’d buy!