Participant

Question

InDesign v19.4+v19.5 Crashing when Printing to Adobe PDF Printer

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
August 20, 2024
2 replies
472 views

I work in local newspaper design, and when we export our pages to send to the printers we use a Print Preset that uses Adobe PDF rather then exporting (don't ask us why, but the printers were having trouble with transparency when exporting so they asked us to swap).

This has always been fine and has always worked accept last week, when it started to crash halfway through the "printing" stage, now it crashes every single time!

I have tried repairing my Adobe PDF and Adobe Acrobat installations as well as re-installing InDesign 19.4 (as this was the version I was using) and later updating to 19.5 but the issue still persisted.

This is really fustrating as part of our publication workflow is the creation and sending of PDFs and if im not able to do this anymore it creates a bottle neck on the rest of the team as on a deadline it gets to a stage where I am helpless and have to get the rest of the team to pick up my slack.

Any suggestions are welcome and anyway of debugging this is welcome as well as no crash reports or logs are created.

This topic has been closed for replies.

leo.r

Community Expert

(don't ask us why, but the printers were having trouble with transparency when exporting so they asked us to swap).

By @Gannon29814328ktot

Did you try to send them PDF/X-1a files? This would flatten any transparency.

If those printers are real printers in the business of printing, they should be able to process PDFs exported from InDesign.

G

Gannon29814328ktotAuthor

Participant

Firstly, I dont respect your wording of them being "real" printers, they are not the issue.

But I will take this onboard, if I can't get Print to Pdf working then I'll have a chat with them and see if Export to Pdf is viable, and like I said, that's how we used to do it, but something changed so we swapped.

rob day

Community Expert

the printers were having trouble with transparency

Hi @Gannon29814328ktot , If the problem really is transparency then set the Export>Compatibility to Acrobat 4 (PDF 1.3), which flattens all transparency. As @leo.r , suggests, the PDF/X-1a Standard requires Acrobat 4 and only allows CMYK and Spot colors.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Just as a test, are you able to successfully export PDFs, using the application feature and pretty much any stanard/preset?

—

I won't directly challenge your workflow except to say that it sounds like a poor choice to get around some other limitation, and stacking fixes and workarounds almost always leads to a crisis. The knowledge base here is quite deep and the real solution might be helping you work out a workflow/export method that uses the MUCH more reliable export-to-PDF method. Print to PDF is and always has been something of a hack intended to give any application the ability to create a PDF, without having integrated export code... and it's always, always inferior and less reliable.

But that's step 2; for step 1 just see if your documents export to PDF okay, whether or not they're ones that will make your printer happy.

G

Gannon29814328ktotAuthor

Participant

Regular PDF export works fine, I work as an all-round designer so anytime I create a proof or need to make a PDF I use export, the only time I ever use the Print to PDF is for the Newspaper Pages that are sent to our printer, like I said, I'm not sure why we do it this way, we have both print and export presets set up and only till about a year ago did we swap to print PDF as it was a fix that worked and we have just stuck to it, its only just now started to crack and its only affecting me.

I could talk to the other designers as well as the printers to see about testing if the exports are usable again, but I would still like to try and fix this problem rather then just avoiding it, just so that it is usable in the future.

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