Jan

CS4 InDesign tutorial for pdf/ppd error & Lewis Brothers

The following blog was written out of frustration as no documentation can be quickly found on the internet about the following .pdf printing error experienced when using InDesign CS4 to ouput older ID CS version files. Maybe this information will help others in getting results from ID CS4/Acrobat Pro. Adobe does provide some good documentation on the troubleshooting of printing pdfs from InDesign and in printing .pdfs in general

For the past few days, I’ve been gathering up some old CS3 .pdf references to send out for bid to several print vendors.

The project is the same format, but needs new “innards” for content.

As you may know if you use InDesign, your filename tab at the top changes to “xxx.[converted]” when opening an older InDesign version formatted file. This is fine.

Filename/tab changes as you open up older ID files into a newer ID version.

I then saved the file to CS4 format and tried to output a .pdf of the old content for review. After about an hour of experiencing errors., I gave up and went ahead and just used “export”. The problem with using “export” is that you may not want to use such a basic setting if you’re wanting to output content of a certain page size, with custom crop marks, etc. to the .pdf you’re creating from within ID.

Unfortunately, a lot of the files were CS3 InDesign files and had issues printing to .pdf, using the “Print” menu command from ID’s main “File” menu and often generated the error as shown below.

The error you may see when trying to ouput a converted Indesign CS3 file from ID CS4 whether it has been converted or not.

Bastard PPD error you may see when trying to ouput a converted Indesign CS3 file from ID CS4 whether it has been converted and saved or not.

To finally be able to output the older, now converted ID files to .pdf, I chose a different PPD setting/printer. I then output the content to that printer. After printing the content on the physical printer, I saved the document. I then chose a different printer (my Adobe PDF) printer. The .pdf then printed fine with any extra settings I chose. I know this seems like a simple hack, but it took a while for me to get to this resolution at least.

To get these CS4 print errors out of your life, simply choose another printer, and let that print job execute. Then save the document and outupt the file selecting your Adobe PDF printer.

While I don’t have the time to troubleshoot if there is some linked content that is causing the print job to fail (certain .eps or .ai files or their versions), the fix described seems to work fine.

I attached some photos of the final original program as I think it’s still a worthy portfolio piece. I also attached my .pdf/personal trophy of the day to show how I specified different heights of a multi-level emboss to the diemaker from within Adobe Illustrator CS4. I think the results of this communication using Ai were great and eliminate any guess work when you’re trying to convey such a process. Maybe this will help someone too.