Converting linked EPS or PDF graphics to PDF

[gbergan52]

Hi everyone,

I have another issue with the 2015 version of Frame (working on Win 10 and Acrobat DC). I often receive Word manuscripts and accompanying graphics in either EPS or PDF format. It used to be that FM was very efficient at converting the final layout to a PDF file, usually in less than a minute regardless of the size of the graphics. With this upgrade, however, I've been dismayed at the wait times - one technical paper took 8 HOURS to distill - it had 7 figures that were all PDF files! I had to leave it run overnight and went to bed. The next day, I opened the PDFs in Photoshop and downsampled them, then tried to run the distill again, with very little improvement.

Is anyone else running into this? What can I do? I usually love getting these file formats because of their scalability, but when I have more than 1000-pg books, it's out of the question to have this kind of glitch in the system. Thanks for any ideas you might have for me.

Gail

[Arnis_Gubins]

Gail,

This is one of those issues that seems to be installation dependent. Are you creating the PDF for online or print?

FYI, FM internally converts a PDF to an EPS format, so you can make a minor throughput improvement by saving all of your PDF graphics as EPS files before importing into FM.

Try the alternate route of printing to file and then manually running Distiller on the postscript file. For online PDFs, don't forget to enable the "Generate Acrobat Data" option in the Print dialogue.

[gbergan52]

‌Arnis,

The final PDFs are written to a CD or DVD; they are part of a larger reference document set that all works together.

What you suggest (print to file, then distill the ps file, check the Generate Acrobat Data) is already my normal workflow. I have to use this method because I use MicroType's TimeSavers, which won't work unless I do it this way.

It doesn't seem to make much difference whether I'm using PDF or EPS files; they both seem to take literally hours to distill. This never used to be the case. It's another thing that used to be seamless that is now a huge problem with this new version.

[Arnis_Gubins]

What's taking the longest time in the workflow: the printing to the .ps file or the distilling [you mentioned 8hrs in the original message] or both? What level of resources (RAM, free space) does your machine have? If it's just the distilling step, then the problem may be with the new Acrobat DC configuration.

Have you tried the SaveAsPDF option? FWIW, you can use Timesavers with the SaveAsPDF option. Just select the correct joboptions file and have the Timesavers prolog (and epilog) file in the right place. [Shlomo does this now all the time in his on-line presentations]

[gbergan52]

‌Printing to .ps is taking the lion's share of the time; distilling is as fast as ever. I haven't tried SaveAs PDF; I didn't realize my TimeSavers would work like that. I'll try that next. I have 8 GB of RAM and over a TB of hard drive space - all my work files are on an external hard drive.

[Arnis_Gubins]

How is your external drive connected, i.e. USB2, USB3, eSata, other? USB2 connections can be a bottleneck.

Have you tried printing the file to your local hard-drive?

Are you printing to the AdobePDF printer instance and how are the spooler settings configured? Incorrect spooling can really bog down the process.

[Arnis_Gubins]

Forgot to add: Have you tried printing to file without the "Generate Acrobat Data" option? If there is a significant timing difference between these routes, then the postscript post-processing routines in FM could be the culprits. [You can disable some of these in the maker.ini, though this is approaching "last resort" territory.]