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Mouse Waver
Mouse Waver
Inspiring
June 23, 2021
Question

Indesign > Postscript "Printing Error: The Adobe Print Engine has failed ..." caused by placed pdf

  • June 23, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 410 views

[ I found an answer to my issue, I post this in case it helps anyone else. I wasted an hour trying all sorts of stuff, trashing InDesign defaults etc etc before I worked it out. ]

I sometimes "print" to Postscript files from InDesign CS6 on Mac (El Capitan) and distil them to pdfs. Never had a problem with it, but on a recent indd file I got the message  "Printing Error: The Adobe Print Engine has failed to output your data due to an unknown problem". It would get to the very end of the document, then this appeared.

I found the problem was a placed image - a single page from a pdf made by someone else (probably in Windows) using MS Word. I opened the pdf in Acrobat, resaved the pdf page as a tiff, and that worked. I managed to isolate the issue by "printing" one layer at a time of the InDesign file to Postscript until I found the offending layer, and could see from the progress bar which page it was failing on.

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2 replies

L
Community Expert
LaubenderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 23, 2021

Hi Mouse Waver,

if you are only printing to PostScript, because you want to do a size change, consider a better workflow:

 

Export your A3 pages to PDF with the PDF/X-4 preset where you do not do color conversion or downsampling of images.

Place the exported PDFs scaled in a new A4 document and from that export to PDF for your client.

 

Use the MultiPageImporter script originally written by Scott Zanelli, now curated by Mike Edel,to automate placing and scaling your A3 PDF at the same time:

 

https://github.com/mike-edel/ID-MultiPageImporter/releases

 

 

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Mouse Waver
Mouse WaverAuthor
Inspiring
June 23, 2021

Thanks for that, Uwe.

 

I did bookmark the Zanelli script in 2018 and 2019 along with a similar one from "Dr Scripto".

Am sure I have used it but can't remember why I removed it. Maybe it was a trial version or I had some issue with it at that time.

Tried your suggestion and it worked fine, I got a larger pdf than I was getting before but will play around with that.

Mouse Waver
Mouse WaverAuthor
Inspiring
June 23, 2021

Too late for editing but wanted to add... as a test, I thought I would see if I could get back to having the placed file as a pdf - in case anyone else  in this position did not want to replace a buggy pdf with tiff/whatever.

 

I opened the original problem pdf, (4 pages) and extracted the one I wanted. Saved that as postscript, distilled back to pdf, placed that in InDesign, *printed to postscript, *distilled that to pdf, all fine.

 

* This is a rather strange workaround I have to do because my client demands all my A3 documents be sent to him as A4 pdfs, because it is "beneath him" to remember how to "fit to page" on his own desktop printer! So I have to print to postscript to get the size reduction, then distill to pdf, rotate the portrait pages back to landscape and resave!

 

NOTE I don't know if it's an OS or CS6 thing, but I find Acrobat is MUCH more sensitive to file location/filename duplication/filename replacing when saving than it used to be. Files that will NOT save into a folder will save to the desktop with no problem, then I drag to the correct folder. Another workaround.

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