Problems making a PDF from Indesign CS5

For those people too lazy to read all the posts correctly (Like Myself) Bob has helped me out by creating a new book, adding the doc to the new book and exporting from there, books export in the foreground.

Thanks to Bob and all the others who are helping with this issue.

Have a good one

Hi all,

have fast-read most of the threads and choose to put my experience to Export PDF from ID CS5 in this thread instead of starting a new...

Have in many years used PS via Distiller, and I really trust Distiller for making god PDFs. Now, in Snow Leopard the Adobe PPD is not available and we are "forced" to Export. Have made a lot of books lately, and have experienced the Background task hanging - but only if I put several documents in a "que". One or two documents works fine. But I loose the "feeling" of the progress...the PDF is on disk and looks OK as an icon, but is not. We have to be patient. I really miss a progress bar...

Anyway, I am back to using Distiller becuase of the everlasting fontissue. Have experienced that fonts dissappears or jump.

Dissappears:

Exported a job with a lot of text. Randomly whole paragraphs are missing on different spreads, on other spreads its OK - yes, its the same font, same paragraph style, same characther style - only another spread in the same document, and its reeeaalllyyy random.

Jump:

Had a book, about 100 pages, a reprint, all I did was to open ID-file and export PDF. On one page, only, there was a fail, the word: "AUS?". When exported it said: "US?  A". The A had jumped like 5 places to the right. As seen on the pictures the person who have made the book original have played around with tabs and spaces, but I dont think that is the reason as this is done on almost all the headings. And its one textframe!

Both of this issues was solved using "god old PS - Distiller - PDF metod".

Anyone else who have experienced this kind of issue? I reeealllly dont like it.... :-(

Any suggestions from any user or adobe person on how to turn off the "background tasks" process?

Even if it involves hacking inside the program?

Hey Adobe, is this likely to ensure something that worked so well (and a fairly crucial function) in the previous version can work again with this version? [Ok, I probably don't expect to receive an honest answer from them regarding whether disabling this 'new' feature will improve performance]

I joined this thread early on and want to thank all those that have posted their comments and experiences. The honesty and candor has been very helpful and without it I would still be trying to export to PDF instead of using the Presets. This one modification in the process was the difference in success and failure. I was able to successfully use the preset to create a PDF of a 724 page book. It is very important to keep the Background Task window open to see the progress, otherwise there is no indication that something is actually taking place, and it is easy to open the PDF too soon thinking it is done - which obviously results in an error message.

Two key steps:

1. Use Presets

2. Use the Background Task window to monitor progress.

Thanks again!

I followed your discussion very interesting and I only a couple of points to make: to use InDesign CS5 when I left the trial at Adobe, I'm working quite a while 'with the purchased version and the problems described from you I've seen them only once they went into the export loop but before you read this discussion I attribute the problem to the file. indd, being a CS version. I confirm that the cancel button does not work.
Using the Italian version on MacOS 10.6.4 ... it can hit something?

PS: There are many free scripts to export to pdf that seem to work perfectly, can not be a temporary solution?

Greetings and sorry for the bad google translation.

Alberto

All,

Just a reminder, if you can provide a packaged document along with PDF preset (aka .jobptions file) that consistently causes a failure when trying to export to PDF, please send it to me. You can contact me directly at mlaun -at- adobe.com. But without a file that will reproduce the failure, I'm not likely to make much headway, so please email me only if you have files that consistently reproduce the failure. Even better, test it on a colleagues machine to confirm it fails there also, then get in touch with me. I can make FTP information available for you to upload them for me.

Sincerely,

Matthew

I haven't read all the posts here, but one post did have the answer for me at least. Create a new pdf preset using the same specifications as the default preset you want and rename it. Then export to pdf (print) choosing your new preset, open the background tasks panel and watch as each page is processed. This was a big relief for me after countless and desperate failures - interactive pdf didnt work as it will export spreads if your document is set up as spreads - and print to postscript and distill option was not practical for proof pdfs. I was contemplating uninstalling and reverting to CS4 before this solution. Why they made apparently needless changes beats me.

Liz

I just upgraded to CS5 and have been experiencing the same problems with PDF export. The progress bar in the Background Tasks window stalls out between 9-14 percent, and the only way to close the document is to do a force quit.

Restarting the system (not just InDesign) seems to correct the problem temporarily, but it shows up again after a few PDFs are exported.

I've had it happen with legacy CS4 documents as well as newly created CS5 documents. But it seems to happen more consistently with legacy documents, and most consistently with legacy documents that include drop shadows. Those almost always fail. (I have not tested any pages with other types of transparency.)

I'll be happy to share any documents and will be in touch with Matthew to see if he's interested.

This bug is a show-stopper. Can't use CS5 until it gets fixed.

Steve

If anyone has a file that consistently refuses to export, I think Matthew Laun might be interested in seeing it. Of course none of the files that gave me trouble before will mis-behave now, so I'm not doing well  in providing test fodder.

You can contact Matthew by clicking on his name on his post above and sening him a private message -- don't send a file until he asks you, and be preapred to wait for a response since this is vacation week at Adobe.

If we can't ALL be civil and constructive and stay on topic and away form personalies I'm going to shut down this thread.