Acrobat Pro X postscripting problems - Large files

[windshear]

I operate in a small team where we are required to run all of our documents through Postscript. This is generally done by one member of the team However, I have noticed that on that team member's setup the postscript files are:

1) Taking an inordinately long time to save to .ps

2) When they are produced, they are extremely large in size.

For instance, we had a 3800 page document which produced an 89.7gb postscript file on the affected team member's computer. When I repeated the process on my computer, it produced a roughly 6gb postscript file. We operate in a SOE environment, and all machines are identically spec'ed, so theoretically the setup should be identical.

I haven't seen any other examples, but the team member has been complaining about this issue for quite a while.

I was wondering if you guys had any ideas about an explanation of the possible causes of this problem?

Roughly our workflow is to:

1) Collate a range of source documents (word, jpg, htm, excel etc) and combine them using Adobe Acrobat.

2) Save as a pdf.

3) Save it as a postscript file.

4) Run the postscript file through distiller.

We're running Acrobat Pro X v10.1.16 and Distiller 10.1.1613 on Windows 10.

Thanks in advance

[Dov Isaacs]

A much better question is why in the world are you “refrying” a PDF file by saving it to PostScript and then distilling? Here at Adobe, we most strongly discourage that type of workflow!!!

That process does nothing to “improve” your PDF file in any way. In fact, it can be destructive in that all transparency is flattened possibly causing text and or vector data to be converted to raster images at some resolution. All color management is lost. You may lose searchability and editability of text, etc.

If there is type of optimization you wish to achieve, that is much better accomplished via Acrobat's Preflight facility or even the options to save a PDF as optimized (where you specify what exactly you wish to optimize, typically by downsampling images, eliminating metadata, etc.)

          - Dov

[windshear]

The simple answer is that because we then use a redaction plugin to redact information from the PDFs. And basically the plugin craps itself if the pdf isn't postscripted.

To answer the next obvious question, Adobe redaction simply doesnt suit our needs, and isn't as flexible.

The basic idea is somewhat destructive in its intent - take whatever source material or file format it comes in and 'normalise' it for want of a better term

[Dov Isaacs]

OK. Understand what you are trying to do.

And I certainly won't argue against a custom redaction plug-in if that is what you need! 

What is really going on is not that you necessarily need PDF created via distillation of PostScript, but rather, that the plug-in in question can't handle certain aspects of the full PDF specification and that this “refrying” exercise yields PDF that is a subset of the full PDF specification.

However, if you were to know specifically what the plug-in is crapping out over, maybe we can give you a much more efficient solution. For example, if the plug-in can't handle live transparency, there are multiple, simple, and fast solutions within Acrobat itself to efficiently flatten transparency. If the plug-in can't handle a particular color space (let's say RGB or CMYK), again, there are solutions within Acrobat to fix such issues. It would be very helpful if you in partnership with whoever authored that plug-in could isolate exactly what PDF construct causes the plug-in such distress!

To your original question, why the humongous PostScript file and why the difference between systems with allegedly the same configurations (assuming of course the same input PDF file)?

A 6GB PostScript file is pretty large and could readily be due to transparency flattening which can cause quite a bit of space-consuming rasterization of content in areas involved with transparency. Why one system might have 89.7GB as opposed to 6GB on another system? The difference could be settings within Acrobat itself, settings that are not locked down in your standard system configuration. Examples of such settings are image compression and transparency flattener settings. (By the way, what is the size of the PDF file that yields the 6GB of PostScript?)

          - Dov

[windshear]

Hi Dov,

I appreciate your assistance.

The problem with the redaction plugin primarily occurs where an email has been converted to PDF, either directly, or as a part of the "combining files" process. If it has not been run through distiller it either refuses to redact anything on the pages which were originally an email, or it gives an error and refuses to redact anything in the document as a whole.

We use another piece of software to convert emails (primarily in .msg format) to pdf. (and I'm paraphrasing here) First it saves it as a .mht file, before converting it to pdf.

The distiller "solution" is what is recommended by the plugin developer.

As to your question regarding the difference in postscript sizes, they were using the same source pdf file, which was 731mb in size. (roughly 3800 pages) Given my experience, I would say that 6gb was relatively normal for that size of document, based on my experience of using the current process.

Thanks

[windshear]

Not sure why this question was marked as having been answered, but I've been away for a couple of weeks.