PDF issues after export from InDesign
Mayia5 Posted messages 51 Registration date Status Membre Last intervention -
Hello,
I'm encountering a problem generating a high-definition PDF from InDesign. It's a fairly large InDesign file as it's a catalog that I keep updating over time. Recently, I generated a PDF without any issues, until today: when I open my PDF to view it on Acrobat, some pages with images appear blank, and this happens quite randomly because I've generated my PDF several times, checked every setting on both InDesign and Acrobat, and nothing. However, strangely, it's never the same pages that come up blank each time; sometimes it's one, sometimes another, so I'm starting to think that my source file is fine?...
I'm going in circles and can't resolve this issue, and I need to send it to a client... Help!
I hope your insights can assist me :)
Thank you very much in advance :)
8 réponses
*I just want to point out that Indesign often crashes before the PDF finishes exporting. I have version Indesign 18.5, I tested version 19.0 and the same problem occurs. Either it "crashes" and Indesign closes unexpectedly, or my file is incomplete. I'm puzzled because this has never happened before.
Contrariness, I just did a test with the Mac preview tool and there seem to be bugs on some pages, some graphic elements are missing, and the colors are more muted. It's a new output that I generated again, and once again, new pages are empty, while others that were empty before are not... I should mention that some of the boards that are no longer showing are the same ones I had printed before the summer... a real headache! And my design reveals no errors.
Maybe your file is too large and needs optimization.
Acrobat calculates each page for display and printing... You might want to generate your PDF by checking the resolution of the images or at least resampling them to 300 dpi for images above 300 dpi.
If you have embedded images at 300 dpi but have reduced them by 50% on the page, the resolution will have doubled.
Thank you, contrariness. I checked the resolution of my images again and they do not exceed 300 dpi, and I have not reduced them. For your information, the size of my source InDesign file is 98 MB and the size of my HD PDF file is 295 MB. I tried to resample directly in the compression panel before generating my PDF, but that didn’t work either...
The difference is normal.. in Indesign, they are just previews and links.
Now, if the document is intended for printing, you shouldn't lower the resolution too much either...
Try printing to PDF (using the Acrobat printer if it's installed) instead of exporting.. You have more optimization options available, such as font management and others...
The other solution is to split your document into 2 or 3 parts and then combine them later in Acrobat.
Hello contrariness,
thanks again for your help. I tested using a pdf printer, but unfortunately, the result is not satisfactory in my case because there are pages where lines appeared in the visuals (lines corresponding to the edges of the illustrations that should not be visible, I think this is due to flattening. And the colors are not as I would like them to be. Nevertheless, thank you very much for the idea ;)
To answer your question, this is a pdf intended both for sending by email and later for printing.
Regarding the option of cutting it up and combining the different parts in Acrobat, I tried this solution but, even saving it in several parts, the bugs (blank or incomplete pages) continue to appear in each part.
What I still don't understand is that I had already generated pdfs from this same file before, and the sheets that are glitching are the ones that appeared perfectly in the export of my previous pdfs...
mmouis.. A 285 MB PDF file, you will never send it by email... Providing a download link would be possible as long as the recipient agrees to do so.. because not everyone has fiber optics..
For lines in a HD PDF, these are often artifacts. When printed, you shouldn't have any issues.. This is often due to a problem with the resolution of images when they are layered... Check the flattening of transparencies when creating the PDF.
You can also create a PDF as an image. This is an option when printing to PDF (from Acrobat). In this case, for the screen a resolution of 96 dpi is sufficient as that’s the resolution of screens (but not 4k!) all pages will become images..