The printer of my six magazines uses Agfa Apogee as a file upload and page proofing portal and it is brilliant. However this month issues started with my exported PDF's (using High Quality Print (Modified) settings) the same as I have used for years from InDesign. This time a lot of images went missing and even typed text disappeared when up on the portal. I ended up having to rasterise the pages affected in Photoshop by flattening the layers and saving as a Photoshop PDF.
Agfa have told my printer to advise me:
"This issue is caused by PDFs created in the latest InDesign version 18.4. The work around is for your supplier to downgrade InDesign if possible. Or save the PDFs to a lower version e.g. PDF/X-1a"
The print providers I work with using Apogee workflow have always requested PDF/X-1a. There are times that native files along with packaged assets are requested, and PDFs are generated by printing postscript, sent to an Apogee Distiller/Refiner. And this process is creating a flattened, ver 4 PDF as well.
In my situation, I either provide files to their specifications. Or if PDFs are not to spec, the onus is completely on me, regardless of how digital proof or hard copy proof appeared during approval.
My colleague, who works with Apogee, experiences the same issue. Since InDesign version 18.4 there seems to be a difference within the exported PDF's 'internal code', which causes a conflict in Apogee nowadays (error messages etc). Downgrading to an earlier version of InDesign is not an option for us. However, Agfa claims to have a plugin that fixes this!? But your server must be able to run the plugin and al latest versions. (Therefor we are now buying a new server, but it was about time to renew or old server anyway ...)
We use Apogee, but don't use their proofing portal… the question would be, if the PDFs will rasterize like this at the end of the output?! [edit] If you rely on that proofing portal just do as Agfa advised... PDF/X-1 is not the best option these days but still a valid workaround... I myself would be careful though... who knows what messed up their portal... the important thing is that the output is correct: I don't know from where inside Apogee their portal gets its data from, but e.g. PDF outputs work back to front, so the actual output raster data gets compressed and downsampled and whatsover and then put inside a PDF to be viewed. [/edit]
As to Jeffrey's comment: we use PDF/X-4 constantly and preferably and never had issues. Not sure what you do with native files but they have (in my humble opinion) no place whatsover in a print workflow.
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