Inspiring

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PDF made from book file ruins Illustrator graphics

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
October 7, 2021
6 replies
4872 views

I've been working on a 300 page report with dozens of placed Illustrator files. The report is made up of 19 separate .indd files. If I open one of the component Indesign files outside of the book and Export to PDF (Press), I get decent graphics. But if I open the Indesign book file, highlight all the files, and Export the whole thing to PDF, the Illustrator graphics come out in some sort of low-res version. My .ai files are almost exclusively pure vector, so there's no reason they should look pixellated. And they look just fine if I Export to PDF outside of the book.

Indesign is at v16.4 x64. Illustrator is at 25.4.1 (64-bit), latest versions, I think.

This is the very last step. Wrong time to have these very dependable programs fail on me.

Any ideas?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Kenneth C. Benson

So what resolved this problem was uninstalling newer versions and then reinstalling them. I didn't uninstall ID 2019 because it was working (and got me through this with two very large books). For reasons I don't understand, ID 2020 is not available to me to reinstall (I started with my CC subscription summer of 2019, and it's been kept current since, so I really should be able to reinstall ID 2020, but whatever). In any case, I don't need 2020. But I will keep ID 2019 around just in case this nastiness ever comes back.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi Kenneth,

we have a similar issue here at the InDesign forum of hilfdirselbst.ch:

Indesign PDF-Export: bei Buchdatei wird AI-Grafik als Rastergrafik ausgegeben
tpf, 26. Jan 2022, 22:49

https://www.hilfdirselbst.ch/gforum/gforum.cgi?post=582372#582372

Also this one:

Vektrorgrafiken im PDF unscharf
Wortsalat, 12. Jun 2019, 11:03
https://www.hilfdirselbst.ch/foren/Vektrorgrafiken_im_PDF_unscharf_P570671.html#570671

For the first one listed above we still have no solution. I tested today with the data of the OP; I had no issues at all on my machine. With the second one we had the solution to trash cache and preferences as far as I can see.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Kenneth C. BensonAuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

So what resolved this problem was uninstalling newer versions and then reinstalling them. I didn't uninstall ID 2019 because it was working (and got me through this with two very large books). For reasons I don't understand, ID 2020 is not available to me to reinstall (I started with my CC subscription summer of 2019, and it's been kept current since, so I really should be able to reinstall ID 2020, but whatever). In any case, I don't need 2020. But I will keep ID 2019 around just in case this nastiness ever comes back.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi Ken,

the reasons are that Adobe is only supporting the last two CC versions.

And that are CC 2021 and CC 2022. You uninstalled 2020 so the Creative Cloud Desktop App will only offer 2021 and 2022 in case you unistalled them as well.

To get back 2020 you could contact Adobe’s Customer Care team via live online chat.

The procedure is described here:

How to Get the New Adobe CC 2020 Direct Download Links
December 18, 2019 Updated November 11, 2021
https://prodesigntools.com/creative-cloud-2020-direct-download-links.html

"Just reach out to Adobe’s Customer Care team via live online chat, and they will immediately give you temporary links to download offline installers for all the 2020 apps that you need."

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Kenneth C. BensonAuthor

Inspiring

I worked around this problem by going back to Indesign 2019. The report is published, and my client gave me permission to post one chapter from the book. Here's a link to a packaged Indesign file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zid1pccxu4e4ieb/lo-res-vectors.zip?dl=0

This is saved in Indesign 2022, and a PDF is included in the package. In order to test this, unzip the package, install the fonts (if necessary), and open the Indesign book file in Indesign 2022. Export to print PDF at Press settings. The expected result is that all of the placed AI files will appear as low-res bitmaps in the PDF.

Now close the Indesign book file and open the second (larger, labeled 1b) Indesign file independently from the book. Export to print PDF at Press settings. The expected result is that all of the placed AI files will appear as pure vectors.

I would be most grateful if a few people could test this so I understand definitively whether this is a problem with my particular installation (of both Indesign 2021 and Indesign 2022) or whether this is a bug.

Alexandre Becquet

Community Expert

Hello, i've test with Id 2021 on an Mac pro with MacOs Monterey and all pdf exports was good.
PDF/X4 - PDF/X4 Acrobat 8/9 (PDF1.7)

PDF/X3

PDF/X1a

i'm thinking something who can be great fot you. Instead doing Ai files you can use the Chartwell font : https://www.myfonts.com/search/chartwell/

A real time saving with many possibilities.

Kenneth C. BensonAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks, Alexandre

I will look into Chartwell. For a lot of the graphs I make I've stopped using Illustrator's graphing tool. It's just too primitive. The last big book I did I copied graphs from Excel and pasted them into Illustrator, where I reformatted them to a common style. This was time-consuming, and not updatable (with new data), but even if I use Illustrator's graphing tool, I invariably end up ungrouping the graph so I can change something. Even simply sizing a graph is a problem. Everything else in Illustrator can be selected and resized using numbers. But not graphs.

Kenneth C. BensonAuthor

Inspiring

It would be great if someone could follow that bug report link, read up on how to duplicate this, and then actually duplicate it, let me know I'm not crazy.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

I see from the start of the conversation that this was a previous book file.

Can I ask if you have created a New Book file - and add all your files to this does it make a difference?

I'm only asking because I think I had a case of weirdness using a book file from a previous version of inDesign in a new version of InDesign.

My answer was to create a brand new book file.

With InDesign documents when opened from old version to new version is they get a (Converted) added to the title.

However, you don't see this with the actual Book file.

As an experiment to figure out if older version of INDB are not compatible with the newer version of InDesign.

A solution for now might be to create a brand new INDB in your new version of InDesign.

Be interesting to know if it made a difference.

Kenneth C. BensonAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks, Eugene, that was a good idea. I'm not actually sure whether I Saved As from last year's book file or just made a new one. I know the chapter files (.indd) were Saved As from last year's files, but there's not a lot of payoff for reusing an old .indb file. Because I've renamed the .indd files, it's about the same amount of work to make a new one.

But since I wasn't sure, I deleted the old one and made a new one, added all the chapters, fixed up the numbering, and exported to PDF. I got the same problem (some, but not all, of my vectors were output as low-res bitmaps), but this time the problem started earlier in the PDF. As with earlier experiments, though, after the first bitmap, all drawings were bitmaps.

rob day

Community Expert

If you choose Package Book For Print... from the Book panel flyout menu and check Links and Images, is the status for all of the AI files Linked?

Kenneth C. BensonAuthor

Inspiring

All are linked. That was my first thought, because this looks like what you get when ID can't find the graphic. But there's no error message (at least about links) on export. And it exports just fine outside of the book file. There are some other problems with color, but this report is not actually going to be commercially printed.

Thanks, for trying, Rob. I did find a bug report for this, but there are only 3 of us so far. The bug report says you can duplicate this by putting two ID files with linked vector graphics into a book. I haven't tried this yet, and I'm not sure if it's true, because the problem is not happening consistently. It's most of the vectors in the book, but not all of them. A few (at the front of the PDF) are fine. The majority, though, have been replaced by bitmaps.

rob day

Community Expert

Have you tried embedding a few of the problem AI files?

Kenneth C. BensonAuthor

Inspiring

Screenshot from PDF: exported to PDF outside book

Screenshot from PDF: exported to PDF from book file. This is three separate .ai files. The readable type you see is live type on the page in ID.

Kenneth C. BensonAuthor

Inspiring

Here's another example. This one's simpler. First, exported to PDF outside book file:

Next, exported to PDF from the book:

Figure number, title, and source are live type on the page in ID. The body of the figure (the three graphs) is one .ai file.

Kenneth C. BensonAuthor

Inspiring

I reset prefs, something I haven't done for four or five years. Didn't make a difference.

This looks disturbingly like Display Performance > Typical. Can that somehow be baked into a PDF?

Another interesting detail. It's not all the figures. The first about 10 figures in the book look great. Then everything after that is trash.

Also, I tried opening one of the first .ai files (the key in figure A1 above), making a pointless change, saving it, and updating it in Indesign, and then exporting the whole thing from the book file. This actually fixed the three .ai files on that one page. But the rest were still ruined. And when I exited Indesign, reset prefs, and tried to export the book again, figure A1 went back to ruined. But when I opened it outside of the book and exported, it came out fine.

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