Wrong page numbers on PDF export (ID CS5.5)

[macromac]

The Export to PDF out of a book document (with 12 single documents in it) results in wrong pagination (30, 31, 33, 31, 35, 31 ...). Direct Export out of the same single document is right. I cannot see any difference between the single docs, but the phenomen is only in some parts of the book.

What is the thing about this? Did anybody have similar effects?

Thanks for any idea!

Carsten

MacBookPro Core Duo

Snow Leopard

InDesign CS 5.5 (Design Premium Collection)

[John Hawkinson]

Well, congratulations, that's basically what we wanted. Except:

As per the discussion with the senior level, I have logged this issue with my Product Team and Engineering Team as Bug # 182559740. Our

I'm under the impression that InDesign bug numbers are 7-digit numbers that tend to start with 29 or so. The number you cite looks very much like an Adobe Support Portal Case #. Presumably you have one of those as well -- is it the same? If so, perhaps the person responding to you just cut and pasted the wrong number and you should ask him or her. If not, err, well, I'd be at least a a little bit suspicious.

But it sounds like they've acknowledged your bug, which is great.

[John Hawkinson]

I had started to look at this over the weekend (thanks, Sarah, for sending along the files), and didn't get a chance to come back to it.

Looking at it now, there are several interesting things.

I think the first is that if I use Sarah's book file, I see the problem. But if I create my own book file from the constitutent documents, I do not see the problem.

Tentative conclusion is that this is an issue with the book file, not with the documents.

The next observation is that the two book files, Sarah's and Mine, are not very different. At least by some metrics. While in a literal sense, 10195/69632 bytes do differ (15%), if I look at ASCII text, the story is a bit different. Running the "strings" command on both of them to extract the alphanumeric-looking stuff in the files, and then diffing them, there are only 8 differences (technically 8 "hunks" as reported by diff). They are:

1. "FgPM" at the beginning instead of "FgPM" in mine.

2. com.apple.print.PageFormat.PMAdjustedPageRect is a real number 0.0 in Sarah's, and an integer 0 in mine.

3. com.apple.print.ticket.stateFlag's <inteer>0</integer> has a linebreak across it (or something) in mine

4. com.apple.print.PaperInfo.PMUnadjustedPageRect< is a real number 0.0 in Sarah's and an integer 0 in mine.

5. com.apple.print.PrintSettings.PMColorSyncProfileID is 1294 for Sarah and 1580 for me.

6. another linebreak issue with a second rference to com.apple.print.ticket.stateFlag.

7.  My default printer name and the fact that its an HP Laserjet 8150 is substitued for Sarah's C280 and the fact that it is or has a Fiery E10 50-45C-KM PS Color Server1.1 along

8. The pathname to the constituent files within the book is different, and mine does not have a reference to Process Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black that Sarah's does.

That's it.

Not totally sure what to make of it, really. I suppose I would suggest trying to change your default printer before File > New Book and see if you can find a way to make that matter...

[John Hawkinson]

Wrong!

Argh, nevermind. Operator error. Somehow I placed the wrong files in my test book (INDD files I had created via IDML export to open in CS5 instead of CS5.5). Oh well.

[simonvg]

I'm experiencing a similar problem - Indesign CS5.5 updated to 7.5.1 on a mac running Lion. All pdf-x exports result in errors to do with master page items - wrong page numbers, misplaced text boxes, missing page elements. Of the pdf-x settings, pdf-X-4 works best, but I still need to thoroughly check documents as it still produces incorrect page numbering from time to time. Sat on the phone for an hour with tech support - eventually sent some files to the guy, got a response a few days later asking me to specify a day and time for a call-back - did  so, but no call-back, probably because i'm in South Africa.

Also experiencing problems using variables in running headers - all will be working fine, then suddenly something changes in a document and variables will only work if they are all part of a single story. Never had this in CS4.

Hoping adobe can issue an update to fix these soon - wishing I'd stayed with CS4 a while longer - have wasted many valuable  hours on these problems.

[macromac]

Simonvg,

I started this thread in June and there is no solution until now. I returned to InDesign CS4 with all my projects and recommend this for all who work with book documents. Maybe there are no problems in CS5 – I did not try, because CS4 is perfect for me now.

I hope Adobe will take care of the strange behavior of CS5.5 book documents and fixes it soon.

[simonvg]

great to know i'm not alone in this problem and that adobe are supposed to be working on it. Let's hope they issue and update to fix it soon.

[Paul Erdman]

Simonvg, while there is no official solution from Adobe that solves the problem with their code, there are some workarounds that can help resolve issues for many users. For many of us that require the CS5.5 features for EPUB publishing, reverting to previous versions is not an option. I've found that exporting the problematic portions of the book to IDML can often resolve the issue; it's worked in the two books that I'ver personally had the problem in, and it's worked in the majority of people's projects who've reported the issue on my site. It's certainly worth a try.

You can find a complete write-up of the issue with more complete troubleshooting steps at:

http://www.creativeprogression.com/indesign-book-pdf-export-problem/

Again, this isn't a "real" solution, in that Adobe has admitted it's caused by bugs in the book panel that needs to be addressed with a code fix, but for some reason using IDML can sometimes clean up the issue. It's a bit like voodoo, though, as you sometimes have to run through the steps more than one time, and fixing one document might cause other documents to start exibiting issues, so then you have to use IDML with them.

It's unfortunate that while Adobe has been putting so much development energy into cutting edge bells and whistles they've neglected the bread and butter of desktop publishing. All these bugs in basic book publishing, shortcomings in support for book functions, and the complete lack of basic functions like endnotes continue to be real sore points.

[simonvg]

and thanks Paul for your write up of the issue - very useful information which I will definitely be using.

[D_signer]

I too am having these same issues but the IDML fix has yet to work for me. I have posted on Paul's IDML write-up another workaround that might work for some people.  I am reposting it here as well.

Print to PDF Workaround

This issue was recently escalated to our Chief Technical Officer. He figured out that if you can print to pdf there is no page numbering issue. There are a few problems with this though.

1. NOT ORIGINALLY SUPPORTED: In Illustrator and Indesign CS5 printing to pdf from the print dialog box is no longer supported. There is a pretty simple way to solve this. Go to http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/852/cpsid_85257.html and follow the instructions. This will allow you to set the printer as Postscript file and save as a .ps. This file can then be converted to a pdf using either Acrobat Distiller or Apple Preview.

2. NO BLEED: The next drawback to this method is that I can't see any way to include bleed in the document. The print dialog box shows that it includes bleed, but the final .ps document does not. I am not sure how to solve this problem if anyone can figure it out let us all know.

3. INTERACTIVE PDFS: I have not checked but I only assume that this method will not support interactive PDFs

This method will work for me for now as the only pages that include bleed on my book files are the covers and those pages are very easy to add in later.

Please post here if this works for anyone else and if you find a workaround for the bleed issue.

[LNYVR]

I just updated InDesign CS5.5 - to 7.5.2 and also have a problem with pagination (in one chapter of a 10 chapter 22 page book) when I export to PDF. Not at all happy about this --didn't expect a bug or have to spend so much time searching for a solution. The IDML solution sounds tedious and also sounds like it causes more problems. Is there an Adobe fix to this? I am under the gun to meet a printing deadline. Also does it matter which kind of PDF I export to? ie PDF/X-1a:2001 or PDF/X-4:2008? Thanks

[John Hawkinson]

Adobe has not released a solution, you're not going to get one from them to satisfy "under the gun."

I would suggest exporting the problematic chapter as seperate file and merging it with the others using Acrobat Pro.

[simonvg]

Have you tried re-creating your book file? I found that the problem seemed to be related to book files that were converted from CS4 when I upgraded. When I created new book files and re-imported my documents, the problem disappeared, at least in the books I was having problems with.

[LNYVR]

Thanks for your suggestion. I created the book in CS 5.5 but pagination is still wrong in one chapter.

[Peter Spier]

Is the pagination correct in ID? if it is, try exporting tath file to .idml and repalce the existing version. If not, then the porblem is in your numbering options someplace.

[John Hawkinson]

My understanding that exporting to IDML sometimes works...for a while, but not reliability, consistently, or more importantly permanently.

I also heard a rumor that this behavior seems to be related to tables of contents.

[LNYVR]

John and Peter, thanks for your replies. Given there doesn't seem to be a definitve fix, I called Adobe tech support. One hour later they fixed pagination in chapter via an export of ID book doc to PPS but now there is a problem re-configuring file to PDF -and I am waiting for them to get back to me. I'm told pagination problem IS a bug.

[John Hawkinson]

What is "PPS"?

[LNYVR]

I meant to say .ps, a postscript file.

Sooo... after 3 hours on the phone with tech support we got the pagination right. 1st try was to print book using postscript printer (PPD Adobe PDF 9) The pagination was correct however there is no way to create this standard for printing: PDF/X-4:2008.

Solution was to transfer every chapter from the book (.indb) and combine in one new doc (.indd)  Exported to PDF and pagination worked. Very time consuming. Adobe tech promised they will escalate pagination bug fix. Until they do, I don't trust Indesign 5.5. I'm glad I don't work on many books.

[John Hawkinson]

Ugh. Yes, that sounds like a huge pain.

I think the better solution would have been to simply export the individual documents to PDF/X and then combine those PDF/X files. Or, if you were willing to trust the Book export for all-but-the-problem, export the whole book and then replace the pages for the one that was messed up. You would do these page changes in Acrobat Pro.

I suppose we could even automate this for books with a script.

[LNYVR]

Tech support did suggest using Acrobat Pro, but I don't have it. I could have uploaded 10 chapters, one at a time, via Adobe connect for them to make correction in Acrobat Pro, but that seemed even more tedious.

[John Hawkinson]

Oh. Not having Acrobat Pro makes this annoying, yes.

You can use another tool to manipulate PDFs.

Are you on a Mac or a PC?

Despite it's history of not being 100% accurate at rendering PDFs, I would probably give Preview a shot, because it does let you shuffle pages between PDFs. If that didn't work, I would use pdftk (http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/install-pdftk/), which is a command-line tool.

[Paul Erdman]

The problem lives on. I continue to have success with my own and other peoples files using IDML. The advantage is you can then export the book properly from within InDesign as intended, preserving interactive elements such as bookmarks and hyperlinks. However, I have seen at least 2 cases where people followed the steps perfectly and it didn't work for them. I've seen many other cases where people failed to follow the steps properly; in most of these cases people did not repeat the process after running the IDML fix on the first problem files.

The other workarounds, such as exporting individual problem documents separately and using replace pages in Acrobat to insert them, or printing a .PS file and distilling it, are great if you (1) have Acrobat and (2) don't need the interactive features to be preserved.

In most of the cases I've seen or read about, the problem has involved files updated from previous versions of InDesign. I could be wrong about this. However, contrary to what SimonVG posted, in my experience and in the experience of several other people, recreating the book file from scratch in CS5.5 has not made any difference. It certainly could be worth a try, and if it helps, that would be great! but it did not help in my case or in several other cases I'm familiar with.

I originally ran into this problem and wrote it up on my site on June 1, 2011. I've since tried to keep that article up-to-date. I just updated it again today to include all the relevant information from this thread, and added another link to this thread as well. You can see the article here:

http://www.creativeprogression.com/indesign-book-pdf-export-problem/

[simonvg]

Today I installed the latest update for InDesign CS5.5 - the 7.5.2 update, hoping it would fix the problem, and it seems to have partially fixed the problem, in that there do seem to be fewer errors in the pdfs, but the problem is definitely still there, with missing headers and footers in places, missing or moved page numbers, etc. Let's hope they're still working on this.

[Peter Spier]

If you are still seeing problems, you should file another bug report.

[McShaman]

OMG! I cannot belive this problem even exists and even still exists!

I have the most recent version of InDesign and have been doing an annual report for a few months now and am just getting the file ready for print. LUCKY that I was doing a task in which I had to ceck the page numbers that I stumbled appon this issue!

THIS COULD HAVE COST ME THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS!

What the hell!?