Adobe Illustrator Book Cover

[vanessav75728208]

Hi there,

I was hoping someone could help me figure out an issue I am having with saving my file as a PDF. I've been working on a book cover that is essentially finished and ready to be submitted to the printing company. The company we are working with is Thomson Shore. I created the background art in Photoshop, placed this in Illustrator and then did all the text elements here. Everything is 300dpi and I've been working in CMYK.

I am a newbie at digital illustration and this is the first time I have ever created something for print, so I am rather overwhelmed and worried it won't print out right or something. The author I am working with sent me guidelines provided by Thomson Shore to follow when creating my file and eventually creating the final PDF to submit. According to their guidelines, it seems they want me to save my file as a PostScript and then use Acrobat Distiller to convert this into a PDF. Here are the instructions I am given:

The latest Distiller JobOption file they had was for Acrobat Distiller ver. 10 (TShore10). So this is the file I used to setup the PDF settings in Distiller.

I've been trying this method, and at first the PDF file came out to be something around 300MB in size. The author I am working with informed me that in the past he submitted files within the range of 25-50MB. So I kept messing around trying to make sure I was doing things correctly, and now the PDFs created through Distiller are coming out around 12MB in size. On top of this, when I view the PDF in Adobe Acrobat there are very thin lines around some of the text like this:

It's almost like it is showing the boundary of the text box. And it only shows in these places. All of the other text have no issues.

Now, when I simply save my Illustrator file as a PDF, I get a file that is about 70MB in size and when I view it, there are no lines. Everything looks perfect. I've asked my client if sending a PDF created directly out of Illustrator would be an issue, but he does not seem sure either way. I select the same Tshore10 preset they give for the PostScript conversion process when saving the PDF through Illustrator.

So I guess my concern is if I am doing the PostScript to PDF conversion correctly or not; how can I get a decent sized file and without all the thin lines around some of the text? Or is it acceptable to simply submit the PDF file I created directly out of Illustrator if I am using the same presets they want for the PostScript conversion step?

I hope I provided all of the needed information. Let me know if there is anything else you need to know, and thank you in advance for trying to help this newbie out!

[Monika Gause]

Instructions on how to do it with Acrobat Distiler 7? Oh, really? They are kidding, right? They haven't updated this information for the last 20 years or so. The best thing (or rather: the only thing) you can do with this piece of precious internet history is: ignore it. Erase it from your head completely.

What kind of PDF do they need?

You need to ask them for the specifications, but don't trust them when they tell you how to make it.

[vanessav75728208]

I figured it was outdated information. After a little research it seems like using Acrobat Distiller to create PDFs these days is pretty pointless.

As for the type of PDF, is that referring to the preset options I have when saving in Illustrator? I have the following options: High Quality Print, Press Quality, PDF/X-1a:2001, PDF/X-3:2002, PDF/X-4:2008.

What other specifications should I ask for?

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

You need to know:

- which output color profile to use

- which PDF/X - they want PDF/X, right? Don't let them get away with "Press Quality" or anything like that.

- which resolution for raster images

- how much bleed

- printers marks or not

[vanessav75728208]

Gotcha! Okay thank you so much! I really appreciate the help!