[MacTUG] Composer and Acrobat Pro 9

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

Huh. After I have finally talked myself into giving up on building a package in Composer using Acrobat, I found these instructions:
http://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=26897

Which do a good job of explaining what prefs you need to build a package in Composer that works! I have tried it and it seems to be fine. The bad news (for me is that I am using Acrobat Pro 8, and I am so pissed off at Adobe that I do not feel like giving them any money for Acrobat 9 — especially since they were so !@#$!@##@! lazy and did not upgrade Acrobat Pro when the made CS5 (and if there was ever a package that needed some help, it is Acrobat Pro!!!) So for those of you out there not quite ready to give up on building a package of Acrobat Pro 9, you may want to check this out.

I have found a workaround for not installing Acrobat Pro which I will share for anyone in my situation:
The main thing I wanted Acrobat Pro for was to help me ‘tile’ physically large images (usually photoshop files) so that students can print them on our colour laser printer. Now you cannot print tiled output from Photoshop directly, but other Adobe packages can handle it. I usually recommend that students ‘print to pdf’ an intermediary ‘tiled-pdf’ (e.g., take their 30”x30” poster and create a 12 page tabloid-sized pdf) as this has many benefits which I will not go in to.

The most common way users did this was to open the file in Acrobat Pro and tile from there. Obviously if Acrobat Pro is not installed they cannot do it this way.

The second option was to place the file in an Illustrator or Indesign file and within the print dialog box (once the tiling was set up) ‘print to PDF’ it using the Acrobat PDF virtual printer. Alas, in Snow Leopard, virtual printers have effectively been kneecapped due to security concerns!! Adobe replaced this with a “Save As PDF” command in the PDF popup in the print dialog box, but for a variety of reasons this is not a perfect replacement.

So what am I going to do to create tiled print output in a PDF format?

 1.  From Illustrator (and indesign) you can still ‘print to a postscript file’ and you can save this onto the desktop.
 2.  Doubleclick on this PS file and (if acrobat pro is not installed, Preview will open it and convert it to a PDF. That is cool.
 3.  The one ‘gotcha’ that I have ran into over this is that I have seen issues over colour profiles over this. I am guessing that no colour profile gets imbedded into the PS file so that when it gets opened in preview a profile gets assigned to it which may not be correct. For example I opened an photo from my digital camera which had ‘Camera RGB Profile’ attributed to it. If I did not change this and copied opened it in illustrator, and printed it to a PS file and then opened it in Preview, the colourspace would alter a touch. If I convert it to Adobe’s default profile of sRGB IEC61996-21 before I print it to a PS file, then I seem to have less issues. (Yes, I know that the sRGB is a narrower colourspace than other ones, but it seems to result in a minimized colour change when I do this)

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Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environmental Studies
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
http://www.fes.uwaterloo.ca/computing/people/don.html
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