Placed PDF Printing Poorly

Recently did an ad book that had a color inside back cover...it was a supplied PDF that I placed in my InD (CS6) doc, then supplied printer spread PDFs to digital print shop. The ad came out with drop shadows way out of position; ruined the ad. The printer blamed my PDF. I'd used the standard high quality printing export option when exporting the InD doc to PDF.
I tried printing the same PDF page on my color printer at office and it was fine, no problem at all.
Any ideas? See attached for side-by-side comparison of PDF the way it was furnished to printer alongside a scan of the page the way it was printed. The one on the right is the way it should've been printed.
Thanks.

Peter, you mentioned: He doesn't use/support InDesign (still a Quack shop).
I'll bet the "printer" placed your PDF in Quark for printing/imposition purposes.
This is a well known issue and has been going on forever. Even Quark has acknowledged issues with Quark 10 and has multiple updates.
I'll also bet that the "printer: has an older version of Quark with even more issues.
Ask them if they placed your PDFs into Quark for printing.
They may give you a honest answer, but they may not give you the complete truth, since this would mean that the issue was on their end and require a free redo of the job which costs them money.
Quark had a Best Practices: Transparency guide for QXP 8.1 which show the following:
And this was about a problem with placing a native QXP drop-shadow box over a picture in QXP
If they were having problems with elements that were created within QXP, I shudder to think of the issues they would have with PDFs created from other programs and placed in QXP

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Placed PDFs don't print correct size from InDesign CS2

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carole1130 wrote:
Thanks a bunch. Long story short, I printed from Acrobat in high res,
scanned it in high res to TIFF and used it that way. What a pain!
What a crime. It may look good on screen and even off your desktop printer, but you've now rasterized everything and captured the printer dots from your printer, which should reproduce quite nicely on an imagesetter.
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Peter

Saving as a PDF shows poor quality

Hello Forum,
I designed a logo for a client and, for unusual circumstances, designed it in Photoshop instead of Illustrator. It's nothing too fancy - some text with a nice graphic. However, upon saving the file in a PDF my logo's edges come out visually poor depending on your percentage of magnification. For example, if you're looking at it at 100% magnification then it looks fine, however, the majority of other magnification percentages it just looks horendous. When I print it it looks fine as expected.
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As been noted PDF is not a good choice if your client is going to be scalling the logo for different size documents. If your client has Photoshop save it as a layered PSD file so it will scale well. If you create it large in size it will scale down well when it is placed into a document. Transform also can scale placed PSD files poorly if they are small are transformed up in size. However you can also double click on the smart object placed icon in the layers palette and photoshop will open the smart object psd into photoshop and you can resize the smart object using Photoshop images size where text font size will be changed by changing the text size of the text layers and vector graphics will be scaled up interpolation will not be used.
If you create the logo large you could most likely get by with just using the place transform and automate the process with an action. My crafting Action contains a good sample action. http://www.mouseprints.net/old/dpr/JJMacksCraftingActions.zip
Contains:
Action Actions Palette Tips.txt
Action Creation Guidelines.txt
Action Dealing with Image Size.txt
Action Enhanced via Scripted Photoshop Functions.txt
CraftedActions.atn Sample Action set includes an example Watermarking action
EXAMPLE
Sample Actions.txt Photoshop CraftedActions set saved as a text file. This file has some additional comments I inserted describing how the actions work.
12 Scripts for actions

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Hi
I am trying to save a PDF file as a PDF /A 1b
When I choose PDF /A 1b and click Save, the file is created but the resolution is incredibly poor. Text is fuzzy and when I zoom into images they are pixelated.
If I hit the Settings button in the Save As dialog and change the Image resolution to 300 PPI, the resulting PDF is fine but it is not a PDF /A and a dialog box appears suggesting that Preflight should be used with the PDF /A profile to fix any problems
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Thanks to both of you for your replies.
Here's what we do:
We create PDF versions of MS-Word, MS-Excel, CAD, MS-Access, MapInfo documents. We use CutePDF Pro to merge those PDF's into a single document. Later, we may use Adobe Acrobat to create a smaller file via the virtual Adobe PDF printer which is suitable for transmitting via email. When we create a smaller sized file we do not see a drop in quality. The view options are set so that 'what you see is what you get'.
The original document looks fine and we can zoom in and see small detail in the images and the text stays sharp - same with the smaller file size versions.
We create a PDF /A for archiving because we have to deposit these files with professional archiving services. The people who run this service require PDF /A PDF's which are searchable - this means that text has to be retained. One of things I noticed when watching the output during the PDF /A creation process was that many pages were being converted into images which is of no use to us as the ability to search will not be available.
Regarding the transparency question I have no idea. I will research this and find out how to run the transparency flattener. Hopefully, that will resolve this.
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Select Add a local printer
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Click Next
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Two additional details that may be significant:
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2. Our IT department is rolling out Viewfinity in order to lock down PCs from users installing "stuff". The IT guy who did the install was logged in as an admin but still was unable to install Adobe PDF.
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance!

Close your iTunes,
Go to command Prompt -
(Win 7/Vista) - START/ALL PROGRAMS/ACCESSORIES, right mouse click "Command Prompt", choose "Run as Administrator".
(Win XP SP2 & above) - START/ALL PROGRAMS/ACCESSORIES/Command Prompt
In the "Command Prompt" screen, type in
netsh winsock reset
Hit "ENTER" key
Restart your computer.
If you do get a prompt after restart windows to remap LSP, just click NO.
Now launch your iTunes and see if it is working now.
If you are still having these type of problems after trying the winsock reset, refer to this article to identify which software in your system is inserting LSP:
iTunes 10.5 for Windows: May see performance issues and blank iTunes Store
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4123?viewlocale=en_US

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Unable to save PDF files from web or from any other program.
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Please provide help.
=================
Additional comment to Adobe: Accessing help from the new Adobe web site is extremely difficult and complex.
The various instructions to find help support are very difficult, unclear, incomplete and poorly presented.
Mark Molliver, M.D.
[email address removed by host]

Adobe has not released a copy of Acorbat that fully works with Windows 7 64bit and Office 2010.
Have you looked at "Save at PDF/XPS" in MS Office?
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[Acrobat 8.x] PDF Printer not working

Hi there,
I just migrated from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 7. After having installed Acrobat (as part of CS3), I quickly came across the following nasty problem. The PDF Printer worked about once. After that, it became defunct. When starting a print job with PDF Printer, the entire application hangs. For some reason, there is considerable hard drive activity after that, but the application that has issued the print command does not recover (I waited for several minutes).
I have tried the following solution:
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Hi All,
I am trying to implement my own custom report layout for the following simple Report query
select e.DEPTNO, d.DNAME, d.LOC, e.ENAME, e.JOB
from emp e, dept d
where e.deptno = d.deptno
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previous step.
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Cocoon stacktrace[hide]
Exception in StreamGenerator.generate() context://fop_post/sitemap.xmap - 17:32 <map:serialize type="xml">
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context://sitemap.xmap - 1034:92 <map:mount>
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Guys, what am I doing wrong ? I will appreciate any help.
Regards,
Vadim

Hi Mike,
My standard printing is working nicely. That's the custom reporting that I experience problems with.
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Regards,
Vadim

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Carol, I did change a few things in the attached PDF that are different from the instructions that I first posted. After I re-read your post, you said that the image that you want the user to print would cover the entire page. In that case, you wouldn't need to have the second action of hiding the print images applied to the buttons for roll off. Those images are hidden when you click on the print image, and then you go back to the original state.
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Update acrobat 9 standard no pdf printer

I updated Acrobat 9 standard with 947 and the pdf printer vanished. Then update with 954 and still not there.

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miz_nrg wrote:
Well, nevermind on the SnapShot tool. The text doesn't come out clear. This has become rather annoying.
I tried the suggestion of making a yellow line and adjusting the opacity, but that blurs out the text that's being highlighted and doesn't look too sharp. Any other suggestions? Has anyone else had to highlight something in a document?
The trick here is that the highlights aren't just highlights, they're PDF Comments in the form of highlights. You can make comments in the form of sticky notes, cloud outlines, rectangles, boxes with arrows, and so on.
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HTH
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

Need to hide running heads in placed PDF

I’m trying to reformat the PDF of a book for a client that was set up the wrong size to print. If I could remove the running heads from each page then I could get the PDF into a new ID document that’s set up to the proper trim size. I tried cropping the pages in the PDF, but that just hides the part that’s cropped out. The full page shows up when placed in ID. So then I pulled down the top of each frame in ID so that the running heads were no longer visible. I exported this to PDF and it looks good. I know the running heads are still there, just not visible. I’m concerned that they might show up when the book is printed. Can I assume that if something is hidden on the PDF page it won’t print?

That script probably honors the last used choice for a placed pdf so placing once, enabling Show Options, and selecting trim or crop would be honored by the script.
UnChecked

ID CS2 Incorrectly Rendered & Output Placed PDF

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Any thoughts relevant to avoiding this. Screen shot shows problem.

It is the machine which see's the printer.
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Steve Werner wrote:
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Hi all,
Back again (had to step out to lunch--I was starving!) And boy, it sure is hot & muggy here in Dallas!
Hey Rob, to answer your question, I've compiled the details below:
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2) I've opened/printed the PDF in Reader 9.1.1, printed to both Ricoh 2510 and Epson SP3800, same great results.
3) My setup is: MacPro; OSX 10.5.6; Adobe CS3 (all updates for all apps); the two printers outlined above.
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Cheers!
Mikey

Why have I lost PDF printing capability through the File Print menu? When will it be fixed?

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