Chapter 28
Publising to PDF

Featuring

You have probably heard all of the hype about the Portable Document Format (PDF) being the ultimate prepress solution for professional publishing. Maybe you have even contributed some of it; we have. That’s why we were particularly interested when Corel announced its intention to include in DRAW 9 a Publish to PDF function. We received this information as half-skeptic and half-fan, and we adopted that same posture for this chapter. At least we tried to; however, we found ourselves getting bowled over by this terrific new functionality.

According to the PDF buzz, in the very near future service bureaus won’t need any program but Acrobat, since all artwork will be converted to PDF for output. That’s a nice thought, but anyone who is familiar with desktop publishing or service bureaus knows that you need more than an automated “print button” to achieve success in the prepress world. PDF will not replace knowledge and experience, because the minute something goes wrong—and it always does—that “print button” is not going to help.

With that in mind, there are a lot of advantages to PDF, and if you haven’t already, you will want to consider adding it to your box of tools. It is likely to become a big part of service bureau and other cross-platform workflows in the coming years. Here are some of PDF’s strengths:

•  Fonts are included with the file, eliminating that last-minute mad dash to gather and send fonts with the job followed by that lurch in your stomach as you view the match prints where all of your text has reflowed and is now presented in your favorite typeface of Courier.

•  You can create one document for multiple destinations (print and screen, for example) by publishing the same DRAW file to PDF using different publish options.

•  You can embed or attach “job tickets” from which the service bureau can view your instructions on a per-file basis.

•  You get live PostScript previews of your documents right on your own screen, using Adobe Exchange or Reader, the public-domain version.

•  You (or the service bureau) can make last-minute in-place edits to the PDF file, and print only one page out of many in the file. Try doing that with a PRN file...

And now that Corel has included an extremely robust PDF tool, you won’t have to shell out a couple of C-notes to Adobe Corp. to take advantage of all of this.

Not Your Father’s PDF Tool

If you experimented with DRAW 8’s Export to PDF feature, you may well be thinking once burned, twice shy. That PDF export filter was—how shall we say—awful! If your document contained text or complex objects, you never really knew what you were going to get. Export to PDF was just like using the PDF Writer of Acrobat—it did barely more than take a screen shot, and it had no clue what embedded files were all about.

But the Publish to PDF engine in 9 is different. It is not a rewrite of the DRAW 8 filter, but a completely new engine built by Corel for Corel from the ground up. Corel knows that it needs to fight down a reputation, just or unjust, for being less reliable at the service bureau than Adobe and Quark products. Publish to PDF rings a very loud bell for that cause: it is fast, accurate, and from all indications, bug-free from the start.

OK, It Works. But Why Should I Use It?

Although PCs are making headway in the Macintosh-dominated desktop publishing arena, the fact is most service bureaus, and many designers, are still predominantly Mac-based. Those who have made serious investments into equipment and personnel training aren’t about to abandon a system that is working just because some of their customers bring them PC files. More likely, forward-thinking service bureaus will add a PC or two to their network and buy some Windows software—maybe even CorelDRAW—but they still won’t have the years of experience behind these products that their Mac-based customers rely on.

That’s where PDF helps you. It is entirely cross-platform across Windows, Macintosh, and Unix systems, and it is now completely painless for you to create from DRAW 9. You can avoid the driver search and checklist for creating PostScript print files destined for the service bureau. You’ll be able to trade files with your Mac-based colleagues. You’ll be the envy of your kids’ carpool. OK, so maybe not that last bit, but your workflow will be easier and you’ll have more control of your files.

With DRAW 9’s Publish to PDF (and the right disk-formatting utility), the service bureau operator that peers down his nose at the mere mention of DRAW or Windows will never even have to know where your files came from.

If you already use Adobe Acrobat, don’t stop reading. DRAW’s PDF engine offers several advantages over creating PostScript files and pumping them through Adobe Distiller:

•  You can eliminate the step of generating a PostScript file before starting Distiller.

•  DRAW knows better than any other application how to render its patterns, textures, and transparent objects, and now, so does its PDF engine.