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Question

Poor quality PDF created from Word documents. What happened to Adobe Distiller

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
March 1, 2021
2 replies
2865 views

I am constantly hearing Acrobat DC Pro replacing Adobe Distiller, which was a great tool to get books ready for print. All I had to do was to set up a high-quality print profile and dump the document into the Distiller. Now, I set up Acrobat DC's preferences (which I am confused about is DC and DC Pro the same or two different software?). Then I create a PDF of my Word file, and all I get is what you see in the attached image. This is a 1200 pixel per inch logo coming from Illustrator. How can this be acceptable as a print-ready book. This is the very first page.

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T

Test Screen Name

Legend

By the way you write "I am constantly hearing Acrobat DC Pro replacing Adobe Distiller, " I don't know who is telling you this nonsense. If you want to use Distiller, you still have it, so use it if it works fot you...

foaad61Author

Known Participant

Hi @Test Screen Name

Thank you for taking the time to respond. The issue is not Illustrator at all. The image comes through fine, and it looks fine even when I print the Word document on a laser printer. However, when I save the document to PDF, everything goes haywire. The logo becomes jaggedy, and the fonts are not strong and sharp. This certainly something new as everything was fine even 3-4 weeks ago, and I used to create PDFs with great quality all the time, right from Word without even going to Distiller. Yes, you are right about the Distiller as was @Dov Isaacs. I found Adobe Distiller DC on my other machine. I tried Distiller on it (Win 10), it gave me an error:

%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: setdistillerparams; ErrorInfo: PDFXOutputIntentProfile setdistillerparams ]%%

Does this mean the pdf print profile might be damaged or faulty?

foaad61Author

Known Participant

By the way, I have used your images, placed them in Word and made a PDF with SAVE AS ADOBE PDF. I used Conversion settings: Standard. The result looks fine, and nothing like your original screen shown.

@Test Screen Name

Thank you for testing it. I am not sure, but I have never had this issue even with the Farsi fonts (TTFs) and saving as PDF before. That is why I am wondering if the conversion settings might be corrupted in my system. Do you suggest uninstalling and re-installing Acrobat might help?

Dov Isaacs

Legend

Distiller has been and continues to be a component of every shipping version of Acrobat on Windows and MacOS.

Acrobat DC can possibly refer to either Acrobat Standard DC (Windows only) or Acrobat Pro DC (both Windows and MacOS).

You give us very little details about exactly what you are doing. You mention Word and Illustrator. If you are using Illustrator to produce artwork for a Word document, you shouldn't be exporting a 1200dpi raster image. For Office documents, you should save vector SVG from Illustrator and import that into a Word document. And to create PDF from Word, you should be using the Acrobat PDFMaker facility (Save as Adobe PDF) and absolutely not Distiller.

Maybe if you provide us with more clarity as to your actual workflow we can better assist you.

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

foaad61Author

Known Participant

I am using MS Word 365 and Adobe Acrobat 2021.001.20142. I do understand you feel like you are talking to a newbie. However, I have been doing this since Adobe products were on floppies. I have processed a 270-page transcript for print to creating an 8.75 x 5.75 with bleeds. It contains three TTF Farsi fonts which are embedded and also on my system. I should not have a problem with printing Farsi text and then using the "save as pdf" or the Acrobat ribbon on Word to create a pdf file no matter how large the file might be. The fonts are embedded as printers need them to process the file for printing. However, the quality is so abysmal that I felt to quit using Acrobat and send it to the printers in Word format. I have used all different profiles in the advanced tab of the Acrobat preferences and saved them one by one. There is no quality in any of them. The high-quality print looks exactly as ugly as the standard version. Where is the quality? Attached you will find the image of all versions I have created. In the final version, I have replaced the logo to make it look better. Creating pdfs was the least of my worries in this job, and now it has become my nightmare.

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

It looks to me as if the problem may be deeper. Perhaps Illustrator is not doing the job right, of saving the graphic. Please describe in full detail how you save the graphic from Illustrator, and how you place it in Word. We cannot help you without this detail. It might also be useful if you can share the ACTUAL graphic for us to test with it.

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