Publishing Advice - PDF Print Format

Posted by: Claus On: Sep 6th 2010

Ok, after Gregor gave me a heads-up about PDF/X I've spent pretty much all day in front of the computer figuring out how to ensure my Open Office PDF is PDF/X compliant. As well as learning about the various PDF/X standards from PDF/X-1a to PDF/X-5.

It is a long and messy subject and there are no easy answers. I've posted about it at some length over on my blog and although I had high hopes for PDFCreator I think I'll end up just using Open Office's PDF/A export. Sadly this means I have to forget about the background image I was planning to have behind the text and just stick to plain-old white paper.

If anyone can suggest a free (or cheap) way to create PDF/X compliant PDF with background images and with transparencies (or the ability to flatten them) then I might just find the energy... somehow... to port my document from Open Office. I tried using PDFCreator to print a PDF/X, but as detailed in my blog I don't entirely trust the result because of a number of errors reported by Adobe, even if it looks just fine.

Posted by: Joe Prince On: Sep 6th 2010

I use pdffactory from these folkshttp://www.fineprint.com/ it is a little bit hit and miss with transparencies though...

Posted by: Per Fischer On: Sep 14th 2010

If you want professional PDFs and have total control, there's really only Acrobat. Adobe owns the PDF format and other applications' PDF output is not "true" PDF, strictly speaking. It's a monopoly, and it's a bummer.

Good thing about having Adobe Acrobat is that it allows you to print to PDF from any application, so you can print directly from OpenOffice to a PDF with settings controlled by you.

But the price tag is hefty (companies with charitable status can get it cheaper, but I guess that's not an option.)

Per