Indesign PDF export errors at printer RIP

Report · Nov 22, 2023

I am a publication designer for several small newspapers in my surrounding area ranging in size from 12 pages to 80 pages. Last month two of my jobs had pages fail to rip at the printer with several different errors happening. I was exporting PDFs files from InDesign as usual, I have been working on these same jobs for years with the same settings - nothing has changed except the occasional InDesign updates. PDFs open and look fine in Acrobat and preflight testing say they're OK.

I was using the latest InDesign 2024, though I created an IDML file and opened one of the jobs in the last 2023 version but still had failure. The weird thing is some of the same pages failed, some worked and some new ones failed from that file. I tried every troubleshooting trick in the book, even made pdfs of the failing pages, opened them in photoshop and saved them as jpgs and put them on a new blank template and still some of those failed. I'm at my wits end since I have 4 jobs closing this coming week and I'm scared they're all going to fail again. I thought at first it was the printer's problem but I had a job fail this week that was at a totally different printer. That job I made a postscript file and distilled it and that worked (though I tried it last month with the other job and it didn't work). I do not know who to contact about this. I searched forums and no one seems to have a similar problem. If it is something on my computer causing it what could it be? Thanks if anyone can give me any help .I am running Venura 13.6.1 on a 2019 MacBook Pro.

Report · Nov 22, 2023

What exactly are your export settings? Are you using a custom job options file provided by your printer?

Did at any time it errored did it report a particular error and what was it?

One thing I've noticed recently is more and more v4 ICC profiles gumming up the works. Some RIPs don't like 'em AT ALL (particularly clone RIPs), so check your placed images.

Report · Nov 22, 2023

InDesign 18.4 introduced multiple PDF export problems. Some of the known issues were fixed in 18.5 but not all. Some new issues are still being discovered. Try to revert to 18.3 - will you still have the problem? You can do this from Creative Cloud app: