Problems making a PDF from Indesign CS5

[Teddy_Boi_Toronto]

Hi friends. I have recently switched to CS5 and I find that I usually need to close the program and then reopen it before I can make a PDF. It says it is working in the background but all it does is spin without creating the PDF. Anyone else having this problem? 

TED

[Daniel Cilia]

Guys a week has passed since I have started to use Adobe PDF Presets instead of Export menu and I it has never failed me once yet. Has anyone tried this work-around and worked, or I have just been lucky? By the way when I make a Pdf from the Adobe PDF Presets I have chosen various self-made presets which I have been using since CS3 and CS4.

[sboerner2]

Daniel,

Thanks for the idea. I tried it but the export failed on the very first attempt. Stalled out at 13 percent, as usual.

Guess you've been lucky.

Steve

[Easybourne]

I'm having problems exporting to PDF from ID CS5. This has started just this week. The only recent change being that I updated Acrobat Pro at the end of last week to v 9.3.3 maybe this has caused a corruption to the PDF library or something.

My InDesign stalls at 0% when trying to make any kind of PDF. I have to force quit the app, and usually on the first try after relaunch I can make ONE pdf before I have to force quit again.

I've tried chucking out my prefs, etc, but no dice.

When's a fix coming for this?

[Peter Spier]

Darren Ketteringham wrote:

I'm having problems exporting to PDF from ID CS5. This has started just this week. The only recent change being that I updated Acrobat Pro at the end of last week to v 9.3.3 maybe this has caused a corruption to the PDF library or something.

The InDesign PDF library is completely separate from Acrobat. You don't even need to Acrobat on the system to export PDF from ID.

[Easybourne]

I feared as much.

Apart from chucking away preferences, is there anything else I can try?

[Peter Spier]

Try modifying the settings from one of the presets to get what you want. That's worked for me in the past.

[goanna2]

I haven't read all the posts here, but one post did have the answer for me at least. Create a new pdf preset using the same specifications as the default preset you want and rename it. Then export to pdf (print) choosing your new preset, open the background tasks panel and watch as each page is processed. This was a big relief for me after countless and desperate failures - interactive pdf didnt work as it will export spreads if your document is set up as spreads - and print to postscript and distill option was not practical for proof pdfs. I was contemplating uninstalling and reverting to CS4 before this solution. Why they made apparently needless changes beats me.

Liz

[9999raphael_freeman]

So I have had a more serious problem with exporting pdf and that is random spaces occur in the text in the document . The bug is known to Adobe and the solution that I have found is to print to pdf rather than export.

[Laubender]

@Raphael: can you specify what's going on exactly? What conditions (if any) forces the spaces to occur?

Uwe

[9999raphael_freeman]

Laubender wrote:

@Raphael: can you specify what's going on exactly? What conditions (if any) forces the spaces to occur?

Uwe

It's pretty random. I sent some sample files to Winsoft and they said that this was a problem with pdf exporter. I found that printing to pdf solved the problem but infortunately I lose all the hyperlinks. With all the serious bugs that I've found with CS5 it has been a very expensive upgrade for us.

[MatthewLaun]

Winsoft should be elevating this issue to our developer support department. If they can't asure you that they are doing this, then send me a file and PDF preset that demonstrates the issue, and I'll get some investigation going myself.

Matthew

[9999raphael_freeman]

Matthew Laun wrote:

Winsoft should be elevating this issue to our developer support department. If they can't asure you that they are doing this, then send me a file and PDF preset that demonstrates the issue, and I'll get some investigation going myself.

Matthew

Thank you. I shall try organising that this evening... if not then tomorrow morning... (Israel time of course)

[Laubender]

@Raphael: did you try an alternate route for exporting PDFs beneath printing to PostScript like using export scripts mentioned somewhere in this thread? I think one of them was Page Exporter Utility 5 by Scott Zanelli. Maybe that will work.

@To all: at the Swiss/German InDesign-forum hilfdirselbst we recently had a discussion going on about a bug when exporting to a flattened PDF where the flattener was unable to convert text to outlines (paths) when freshly set up in InDesign CS5. However old InDesign CS4 settings imported to InDesign CS5 were working flawlessly. Some of us reported to Adobe. As far as I know there is no response yet.

Here the link to the thread:

http://www.hilfdirselbst.ch/gforum/gforum.cgi?post=442934#442934

I tried working around that bug by scripting and was able to inject new flattener settings during background export. No problem with that; all text is converting to outlines. However, before publishing the script I will have to do some extend testing. Some strange things are still going on and I'd like to find out more about them…

So, maybe it is worth trying a script for PDF Export to circumvent any problems, be it a background process or not.
For background processing look for the term asynchronousExportFile in the scripts, for plain old foreground processing simply look for exportFile. You can exchange one with the other to get either background or foreground export operations in InDesign CS5.

Uwe

P.S. I posted a ExtendScript (JavaScript) at the InDesignSecrets forum for exporting to PDF as a foreground process. Feel free to try out the code:

http://indesignsecrets.com/forum/general-indesign-topics/pdf-export-problems-with-cs5#2709

[Stix_Hart]

@ Uwe, have you seen the post here by Dov from Adobe?  Might be your Outlines problem?

[MatthewLaun]

All,

Just a reminder, if you can provide a packaged document along with PDF preset (aka .jobptions file) that consistently causes a failure when trying to export to PDF, please send it to me. You can contact me directly at mlaun -at- adobe.com. But without a file that will reproduce the failure, I'm not likely to make much headway, so please email me only if you have files that consistently reproduce the failure. Even better, test it on a colleagues machine to confirm it fails there also, then get in touch with me. I can make FTP information available for you to upload them for me.

Sincerely,

Matthew

[Hilary Klein]

Hi Matthew,

I have been having problems exporting the file. I tried getting rid of the guidelines, and that seemed to work. I was able to export the file twice without having to close InDesign. It was a "vigin" CS5 file, with lots of jpegs made from CS5 photoshop inserted.. but when I tried to recreate the bug.. even with guidelines I had no problem???

It seems to me you just have to restart InDesign once or twice?? I don't know. Good luck with this one.

I use a mac Intel duo processor 2.16 GHz with OSX 10.6.4

Model Name:    iMac
  Model Identifier:    iMac6,1
  Processor Name:    Intel Core 2 Duo
  Processor Speed:    2.16 GHz
  Number Of Processors:    1
  Total Number Of Cores:    2
  L2 Cache:    4 MB
  Memory:    2.5 GB
  Bus Speed:    667 MHz
  Boot ROM Version:    IM61.0093.B07
  SMC Version (system):    1.10f3
  Serial Number (system):    W87130TQVGN
  Hardware UUID:    00000000-0000-1000-8000-0017F2D4371E

I have both CS3 & CS5 on my computer.

Hilary Klein

[Guest]

I followed your discussion very interesting and I only a couple of points to make: to use InDesign CS5 when I left the trial at Adobe, I'm working quite a while 'with the purchased version and the problems described from you I've seen them only once they went into the export loop but before you read this discussion I attribute the problem to the file. indd, being a CS version. I confirm that the cancel button does not work.
Using the Italian version on MacOS 10.6.4 ... it can hit something?

PS: There are many free scripts to export to pdf that seem to work perfectly, can not be a temporary solution?

Greetings and sorry for the bad google translation.

Alberto

[Rouviere Media]

I joined this thread early on and want to thank all those that have posted their comments and experiences. The honesty and candor has been very helpful and without it I would still be trying to export to PDF instead of using the Presets. This one modification in the process was the difference in success and failure. I was able to successfully use the preset to create a PDF of a 724 page book. It is very important to keep the Background Task window open to see the progress, otherwise there is no indication that something is actually taking place, and it is easy to open the PDF too soon thinking it is done - which obviously results in an error message.

Two key steps:

1. Use Presets

2. Use the Background Task window to monitor progress.

Thanks again!

[BobLevine]

You can tell InDesign to launch Acrobat to show you the PDF once it's done. This is a sticky setting so once you select it, it's on until you change it.

Bob

[Daniel Cilia]

Yes by making Pdfs using Presets and opening the Background Tasks to monitor the progress I have not have any problems exporting PDFs from InDesign.

[Freeza_Sama]

An even easier way is to install iStats in your computer, if you have a mac or another program that monitors your CPU... if no Core is working on 100% when you are exporting... its not doint it...

Anyway.. please solve this.. it sucks bawlz! I prefer the old progress bar a million times!

[Bente Hestholm]

Hi, could you please tell me how I go about opening the Background Tasks? My Help program doesn't work so I feel a bit helpless

[Guest]

go to "window" - "Utilities" - and select "Background Tasks"

Douglas Yellow Bird

Vintage Guitar magazine  www.VintageGuitar.com

[LuxMaji]

Greetings all,

Has the latest update to InDesign solved your issues? The change log

mentioned the PDF issue.

So far so good here.

L

[MatthewLaun]

The issue with background PDF hanging due to a PSLibrary task is not addressed in this release. This release was primarily to solve an issue with .idlk files being named incorrectly, and some font fixes. The pipeline for these releases can be long due to the complexity of the process of fix, test, localize, post, test post, etc, etc. But we do have more in the works.

Matthew