Change in PDF job options

[Steve Rickaby]

At 18:06 -0700 30/5/07, Janet Underwood wrote:

>Can someone clarify for me the changes in the PDF job options? I'm using v.7.1 and when setting up a PDF, my options are eBook, Press, Print and Screen. A friend is using v 7.2 and his options are High Quality Print, PDFA Draft, PDFX1a2001, PDFX32002, Press Quality, Smallest File Size and Standard. I understand that PDFX is a "next-generation" PDF format that is very handy for commercial printing.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/X>, although I'm not sure if it's correct about graphics exchange: I always understood PDF/X to be about eliminating the possibility of pre-flighting errors. See Acrobat's online help for a description of the format and its variants.

> I don't understand, however, why online documentation I'm seeing for 7.1 says that these should be my PDF job options too!

There is no answer to this question: whose online documentation is it?

> Is this because of the distiller version or are there some settings that one can define to get the same job options as my friend is seeing? In short, did my friend inadvertantly set these options without realizing it, and is this something I can set in v. 7.1 as well?

Hard to say. The options you list above are pre-defined joboption sets in Distiller. The option sets you get are nothing to do with FrameMaker, as they are dependent on the version of Acrobat you have installed. However, these are just default sets - there is nothing to stop you going inside Distiller to create your own. To do this, though, you need to know to what purpose(s) your PDF will be put.

For pre-press, for example, you should always try to get a custom set of Distiller options from the print house. This way, you can blame them if anything goes wrong ;-)

-- 
Steve