insert pages into press quality pdf

The major question here is what do you consider a “press quality PDF document” to be and then exactly what has changed in the original “press quality PDF document” that you have inserted a page of another “press quality PDF document” into?

To be very clear, there is no concept in the PDF specification itself or even the subsets such as PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-4 of “press quality.” This is a subjective term applied to various options used for PDF creation by various applications including InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat's PDFMaker plug-ins for Microsoft Office (Windows). Typically such joboptions call for all fonts to be embedded and for high quality image compression and downsampling of color and grayscale imagery to no less than 300dpi and monochrome imagery to 1200dpi.

As far as we know, there is nothing that Acrobat's page insertion does to modify the image compression / downsampling or font embedding of either the original PDF document or the inserted page(s) when the Acrobat page insertion function is invoked.

Exactly what difference are you experiencing? Maybe some sample documents (original, inserted, and final-combined PDF files) would help us understand what problem you are experiencing versus your expectations.

             - Dov