Problems exporting to PDF from Quark

[james23f]

This is a lot to ask, but if someone can help me with this, I promise I'll pass the knowledge on to others.

My service bureau can't handle my version of quark, which only saves as far back as 4.0. They have 3.3.

To get arounf this, we're exporting to a flipped, negative PDF file.

Our problem is three-fold.

One, they want to print the acetate directly from the PDF file. That's fine with us, the quality would be fine and the document is only grayscale. But, when you print from Adobe Acrobat, you wind up with a margin. That margin, when it's one the negative image, will wind up printing black. We don't want a thick black frame around everypage.

Two, when we export to PDF through Distiller, we get individual pages. It's not sending the pages as spreads. I'll explain.

The document is eight pages. Each page is size A4, which means that we print to a page double that size and fold the paper in the middle. Voila, the publication is A4 when closed.

Now that we´re exporting to Acrobat, we wind up with individual pages, instead of a side-by-side spread. When that happens, the service bureau can't film the entire spread to make the plate.

Is there a way around this short of reformatting the entire publication as if they were A3 size pages?

Problem three, I have all the settings for the page sizes in both Quark and Adobe set to the right size, but when the file exports, it winds up 8 and half by 11, instead of 8.268 by 11.693.


If anyone can help, I would be very obliged.

Thanks

 

[Pixelchik]

If I were you, I'd find another service bureau that keeps their applications current. There are plenty of print shops around that use the most current version of Quark. You should not have to go through all that!

 

[blueark]

I agree. Quark 3.3? Sure, there are purists out there that argue that it's the most reliable version ever released. That may be so, but most design houses I know of are using at least version 4, and some have moved up to 5. Service bureaus are there to accommodate the majority of users and should never let themselves slip 2 generations behind in their software, not unless they really want to lose all that business!

As for your specific problems, could you explain what method you're using to create PDF files? You're obviously using Quark 5 which has a number of ways of doing this. Also, when you mention a margin, do you mean it's appearing within the printed area, or outside the cropmarks? Is it black on the negative, or white/clear?

The spreads problem may be a little easier though. Open the document layout palette (shortcut is F10) and see what way the document is layed out. If each page is layed out each page over the next, then spreads won't have any effect. You have to drag every second page to the right of the page above it, or use the Facing Pages option, before spreads will work. Essentially, the spreads feature looks at a page, then checks to see if there is a page beside it. If so, it will increase the page size to accommodate it. If not, the page size remains as it is.