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Subject:RE: problems with images in a PDF From:"Johnson, Tom" <TJohnson -at- starcutter -dot- com> To:"Dick Margulis" <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>, "Fiona Krycek" <fiona -dot- krycek -at- gmail -dot- com> Date:Wed, 16 Aug 2006 10:46:03 -0400
Hi Fiona,
Dick is probably on the right track that it is a printer issue. I'd look into what the engineer is doing to print the manual. It could be the printer or the printer driver. It may be the difference between a PCL and a PostScript driver.
If you said you were using wmf instead of emf, I would check with Adobe to make sure you have the latest patch for FrameMaker. Adobe released an update that fixes some of the weird things that were happening with wmf graphics. Using emf mostly cleared that problem up, but I'm glad I discovered the patch just a short time ago. Now my legacy documents will print nicely, once again.
If you decided to convert drawings to TIFF, or any raster image, be prepared for the possibility of longer print times for the manual. Some printers tend to choke and puke when trying to process large raster images.
Also, keep in mind that Acrobat gives you the chance to set the compression level on raster images. Too much compression can really mess with your raster graphics.
Hope you solve the problem.
Tom Johnson
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+tjohnson=starcutter -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+tjohnson=starcutter -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com]On
Behalf Of Dick Margulis
Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 10:35 AM
To: Fiona Krycek
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: problems with images in a PDF
Fiona Krycek wrote:
>
> This may not be the biggest deal -- lots of people have printed out this
> book and don't appear to have had this problem. But it bothers me because I
> don't understand how these images could be showing up correctly at every
> stage but then not printing out correctly, even if this engineer does have
> some weird print settings. Does anyone have any ideas?
>
You haven't told us what printer the engineer used, but I'd guess it was
the old Xerox office printer that the engineering department hung onto
after all the other departmental printers were replaced with newer
models. If that's the case, there's not much you can do about it. I
suppose that if you really wanted to bulletproof the document against
this eventuality, you could re-render all of your visio drawings as
raster images (TIFFs, preferably), and use those instead of the vector
drawings in the document. But that would be a lot of work to solve what
seems like a minor glitch.
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