Since JPEG creates often-visible artifacts in images, I choose either no compression or ZIP compression, which is lossless.

On the issue of compression, I usually choose not to use JPEG (the default) as the compression method for color images in PDF files destined to high-quality printing.

I do this to force Distiller to create a custom font name for the embedded font (this solves an esoteric problem with RIPs that have resident fonts with the same names as the fonts I have on my computer - but I will address that issue in another article). For example, I find myself changing the percentage for subsetting embedded fonts, or changing the compression values or compression method for images in PDF files.įor instance, I always set all fonts to embed and to subset at a fairly high percentage value. Adobe has created these to answer the needs of the general public (“Standard”) and the publishing professional (PDFX1a), but for the work I do there are often things that I need to change. In Acrobat Distiller 6.0, which comes with Acrobat 6.0 Professional, the five available default settings (High Quality, PDFX1a, PDFX3, Press Quality, and Standard) are usually not acceptable to me. This all-important software is in fact a software RIP, similar to the controller on a PostScript printer, but its end product is a self-contained PDF document instead of a printed page.Īt last count there were 1,239,864 variables in Distiller (perhaps a conservative count – experts cannot agree on the actual number), and if you set one incorrectly, the resulting files are not useful: They don’t print correctly, or they don’t have the correct font implementation, or the color space is wrong, or… Distiller is the software part of the Adobe Acrobat package that actually creates PDF files. As a person who makes PDF files all day every day, controlling the many settings in Acrobat Distiller can be a real problem.

What is adobe acrobat distiller use for