The reasons behind putting this page together

Adobe Acrobat is a very powerful application and has the ability to guarantee that when you convert your document to PDF--also known as Distilling your document to PDF, it will print exactly as you see it on your end, no matter where your file is sent as long as its distilled correctly.

This last statement is one that causes the most frustration and is something I hope to clear up. If you have Acrobat 6 installed on your computer, you will have two choices as to how you would like to proceed.

1. Download and install ARC Printing Services settings.
2. Follow the step by step instructions below and set up your own settings.

Either way will work fine.

Image Compression Tab:

When submitting files to ARC Printing Services, or any print shop for that matter, you want the images to be right around 300 dpi. Any more than that, and the file is just bigger, and not necessarily better. The settings to the right are going to guarantee you will not be sending files in that have 600 dpi images in them.

If this profile were to be used for files that you wanted to be online for people to access, you might have the images downsample to your screen resolution (72 dpi) instead. But that's a different subject!

Font Embedding Tab:

This is one of the biggest changes that should be made to the default PDF Settings. It is always safer to fully embed the fonts used in a document. There are three choices: Embed or Ebmed a Subset or Subset. Subsetting only writes in the characters used in a document. This makes it difficult to make last minute type corrections or print predictably when crossing platforms. Therefore, any PDF files that may be printed should have the following settings applied:

Embed all Fonts: Be sure to check this one.

Subset embedded fonts: This refers to the maximum percentage of characters or glyphs in a font that can be used before the entire font is embedded instead of subset. The range is 1-100%.

For example, a value of 50 means that a font will be embedded in full if more than 50% of the characters are used. A value of 1% means that if more than 1% of the font is used, the entire font will be embedded. I like to leave that one set to 1% just as a precautionary measure to ensure that the font is fully embedded.

Color Settings:

One of the biggest complaints about PDF files that my department has encountered is that the color shifts or changes when printed from the PDF vs. directly from the application. This can be prevented with a couple of setting adjustments.

Be sure to have the color management policy set to LEAVE COLOR UNCHANGED.

Advanced Tab:

Just check out the screenshot and make sure yours matches. The one that stands out when I look over this list is the first one, Allow PS file to override Adobe PDF Settings. This takes you out of control of how the PDF will look and puts a fair amount of trust in the person who gave you the Postscript file

PDF/X Tab:

This tab forces the PDF to comply with what is known as PDF/X-1a compliancy. I will go into this more in the future.

Create PDF's for free!!

For basic—and slightly better than basic—PDF file creation at a great price, it's hard to beat Software995's pdf995. But if you're too strapped to pay $9.95, you can get the full version free (you just have to put up with a simple pop-up ad that appears every time you create a PDF file). Whichever version you use, people who view your PDF file will never know it was created so inexpensively.

pdf995 is the print driver that lets you create PDF files, but it has few setting options. A separate program, pdfEdit995, adds features such as support for watermarks, the ability to convert some external links to live links, and an Optimize command for Web pages. (full article from PC Magazine)

You can find a link to this program by checking our links page or by clicking on the graphic below.