Strange PDF

[RuneeMP]

Hi!

I know this isn't the correct forum for my question, but the Acrobat forums doesn't seem to have much activity.

I opened a PDF in illustrator last night and it revealed a lot more content than was visible in Acrobat DC. In Acrobat the PDF showed one line of musical notes, which was what I expected, but in AI another line of notes appeared a bit further down the page. The same thing happens in Indesign when placing the PDF. There is no clipping masks involved.

Anyone knows what is going on here?

Rune

[Willi Adelberger]

You should not open PDFs in Illustrator as Illustrator is not a common PDF editor. Only those PDFs which were created in Illustrator with AI fork can be opened, all others not.

[RuneeMP]

I only opened it in AI to check if the same "extra" content i saw in Indesign was visible in Illustrator as well. The issue here is why I can't see everything that is on the page in Acrobat.

Rune

[Monika Gause]

Which app did you use to create the PDF?

And please show a screenshot.

[RuneeMP]

I think they were created in Finale or Sibelius. I'll post screenshots later today.

[Test Screen Name]

Let's try and narrow this down a bit.

1. The extra notes - do they appear INSIDE the normal size of the page, or does Illustrator show a bigger page (with room for more notes).

2. Are these staves something you expect to see, or something a little surpising? I wonder if someone has masked out what they didn't want; both Illustrator and InDesign will ignore some kinds of mask.

[RuneeMP]

Hi,

1) Illustrator show a bigger page

2) No, I didn't expect to see them. I only expected to see what the preview in Bridge showed me.

I have attached som screenshots from Indesign, Illustrator, Bridge and Acrobat

[Test Screen Name · Accepted solution]

Ah, so it's a page size thing. A PDF has five different size boxes (but none of them is a mask): media box, clip box, trim box, bleed box, and art box. My guess is that different apps are choosing different boxes. I also imagine that what you see in Acrobat is what the author intended, because it shows the crop box - the result of cropping in Acrobat.

[RuneeMP]

You're right! Import options in InDesign were set to its default "Bounding box" and ignored the crop box from Acrobat/Sibelius. It would have been great with some kind of warning, but that's for another forum...

Thank you for you help on this:)

Rune