Press Quality PDF from a Filemaker Layout

[daveinc]

Does anyone have experience creating 4-color press quality PDFs from a Filemaker layout? We have automated our Christmas Card Printing website and Filemaker so that when an order comes in from the website it is imported into Filemaker and the Card is created in a Filemaker layout automatically. Only trouble is, when we print to PDF in FM. it looks like hell. We put Adobe Acrobat XI on the machine, and when we print to Adobe PDF with the Adobe PDF Printer settings set for press quality, the resulting PDF cannot be opened by the press computer(errors). We have tried many different settings in the Adobe PDF prubter preferences to no avail. We have been struggling with this for a month and the season is getting busier by the day so we really need this system to work. Everything works wonderfully except we can't seem to generate a PDF from the Filemaker layout that is acceptable quality and doesn't have errors. If we create the card in Acrobat XI and generate the PDF form within Acrobat, it works fine. But this extraordinary effort in Acrobat is what we are trying to eliminate. PLEASE HELP IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT PRINTING 4-COLOR PRESS FROM FILEMAKER!!

Thanks in advance for any assistance,

Dave

[Karsten Wolf]

You use QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign or some other publishing capable application for that and get the data via AppleScript or XML/Text export from FileMaker to the application.

[daveinc]

Karsten,

You are saying that I can use AppleScript to send a completed card from Filemaker to InDesign and have it output my press ready file to a specific network location without ever having to open the Adobe product? I am interested to know how you would accomplish that. Please be specific and thanks for your reply!

Dave

[qube99]

You are saying that I can use AppleScript to send a completed card from Filemaker to InDesign and have it output my press ready file to a specific network location without ever having to open the Adobe product? I am interested to know how you would accomplish that. Please be specific and thanks for your reply!

InDesign is fully scriptable but it's a bear, very complex.

When sending out material for printing you will need the style guide of each publisher. They will give you all the technical requirements. You're probably be better off sending it in RGB because each printer uses a unique color profile for CMYK. Their RIPs (raster image processors) are programmed to do the color conversions on the fly. Also, let them do the trapping. Use premier fonts and embed them in the PDF. Avoid off-the-wall fonts that might not print correctly.

You might run a file checker such as Flight Check. It will check everything for problems, including some mighty obscure ones.

If you are distributing material to a lot of outlets there are service bureaus that can automate the whole thing. Very nice if you're sending ads to 400 publications or editorials to 2,000 newspapers. They even have distribution lists for sale.

Let me ask you - are you imprinting shells ala Drawing Board or are you printing from scratch?

Also - have you considered printing postscript files rather than PDF's?

[daveinc]

We're not sending material anywhere, we own the press. We can print from Adobe applications but we have automated the whole thing so we don't need to create each customized card in Adobe. The order comes in to Filemaker from the website and the card is created automatically with Filemaker container fields and an image library.

[qube99]

Let me understand a bit more...

Are you trying to use FMP to print directly to a print server or RIP? An Adobe postscript driver should work fine using hi-res EPS or TIFF images. You should be able to open postscript files in Illustrator and maybe Acrobat.

Where does PDF come into play? Maybe you don't need it. If you want to use it then where does it look bad? On screen or on the press?

Have you tried preflighting the PDF? You might be getting screen resolution and not print resolution. Flight Check has a 30 day free trial. It's very good. http://markzware.com/flightcheck/

Are you using dedicated OPI? Problem could be OPI linking if you are, and it's looking good on screen and bad on the press.

[daveinc]

qube99, Will you be available tomorrow sometime to help out with this? We are desperate as we are getting very busy and can't seem to figure out something that works. I will check here at 9am Pacific if you could leave a time when you might be available. Thank you so much for your time and thoughts!

[qube99]

Phone when ready. Earlier is better. This sounds like a fine idea. We can get it to work one way or another.

[Kringle]

Hi There!

Thanks for your help! I am the printer working with daveinc on this.

We are trying to automate the process to compose print ready files for greeting cards. We RIP and print them on a 3000 series HP Indigo.

Currently, we manually build each file in indesign on a mac using .psd images and then export to PDF. We use the "press quality" setting in the adobe pdf printer. It works great, but very time consuming.

We were trying to compose the files in our filemaker database automatically based on the data and generate a print ready pdf or useable file. The file composes properly, but there are issues with the print at press.

In the PDF printer profile settings, when we use the 2005[CMYK] setting, it prints our image nicely but it converts black text to 4 color so it costs more clicks and does not print as sharp. When we use any other setting, including the "press quality" setting, we get chattered screens in the images but the type prints properly as just black.

I think this is because most pdf color settings "tag only images for color management" whereas the 2005[CMYK] converts all colors to CMYK.

We have attempted to use both JPEGs and TIFs and have found the same result so far with both.

I think a .ps file may work. But can you make a .ps directly from Filemaker? If so, how do you go about setting that up? Do you just set up any old laser printer and select "print to file"?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

[qube99]

In Distiller go to your Settings Menu and go through all of it. For instance, select preserve halftone settings to prevent them from becoming 4 color. Also take note of the DPI defaults. It's possible that your images are the wrong resolution creating moires or compression noise when resampled.

To print postscript files:

On the PC you'd need to purchase an Adobe postscript print driver.

On the Mac it depends on your OS.

In 10.6 you would select a laserwriter and then select Save To Postscript from your PDF sub-menu. The quality settings are taken from Distiller.

In older Mac OS you would print to file with a laserwriter driver. Once again quality comes from Distiller.

You can use FlightCheck to check all of that. It will test and report everything, even messed up screen angles, goofy screen types (like stochastic) and under-sampled images (input should be at least 2x output).

The first crack might be to try getting your Distiller settings tweaked and then use FlightCheck to see what the output is.

Then I'd play around with the images in Photoshop and see if TIFF or EPS gives the desired results. Then test RGB and CMYK with and without color profiles. TIFF is usually very reliable. JPEG is a lossy format that I'd avoid.

[Kringle]

I agree that the Tiff should work. I did think it might be a resolution problem when the images are being brought into Filemaker. But the fact that the 2005[CMYK] setting provides a good print result, gave me doubts.

We are trying to create this using Filemaker on a pc. But I'll give it a try on the mac and see if it works. We are using mac OS 10.6.

Unfortunately. you can't tell if there is a problem until you pull a physical print on press.

I'll start the press up and post back in a bit when I have another test.

Thanks again!

Grant

[qube99]

You can tell without putting it on the press with FlightCheck.

On the PC give that Adobe postscript driver a shot. Don't fool around with those amateur freebies, get the real deal. Your RIP can handle postscript just fine.

The image thing can be sneaky. It's obvious we don't understand what's going on there. That's why I suggested using a diagnostic tool. Press proofs are way too expensive and slow.

I've always gotten better results from a Mac than PC. Maybe that's your answer. After all, the Mac was invented to use postscript and is the platform of choice for professional graphics.

[Kringle]

I'm not sure where exactly to get the proper postscript driver or how to install it to make it work.

Do you know where to get it?

Do I create a printer? If so, does it print to file? what port do I use?

If this is the case, it will create a .ps file. correct?

Thanks!

[qube99]

Adobe sells 'em for a few bucks.

[john renfrew]

Years ago, when I made 35mm slides for conferences via RIP we used the QMS Colorscript 210 driver which is built in to Windows if you go to add printer. Try that.

[Ocean West]

although as suggested you can output filemaker data as xml and use various scripting methods to interface with InDesign.

Here is one project I Did with a third party product called Easy Catalog - although it can be used for other data driven InDesign Projects.

[qube99]

Easy Catalog sounds good. Does it use OLE so that a revision made in FMP automatically revises InDesign?

[Ocean West]

If you use the ODBC version and your databases are hosted on FMSA you can definitely have data in FMP and InDesign remain in sync.

http://www.65bit.com/products/easycatalog/odbcdp/odbcdp.shtm