Incompatible font/RIP process problem

Discussion in 'Print Community General Printing Discussion' started by honda4321, Jul 2, 2009.

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  1. honda4321

    honda4321 New Member

    Joined:
    Jul 2009
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    Location:
    Brazil
    I'm having a problem figuring out why two pages in a book i printed with an offset printer came out with squares on/as the text when all the rest of the pages are fine and were not done any differently. One page has the colons and page number as squares; and the other page has squares in between the text as well as squares even on top of the text. The printer told me that their RIP couldn't read those fonts/text and thus it resulted in those squares. I cannot replicate the problem on my computer. The pages of the book were made InDesign, created a PostScript file in InDesign, and then sent it through Distiller to make the PDF. The PDF files look normal on screen.

    Can anyone provide insight on this? I want to fix this problem before doing another print run, which is soon.

    Thank you!
     
    honda4321, Jul 2, 2009
    #1
  2. cjwworld

    cjwworld Member

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    Jun 2009
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    I don't know if you are running a mac. but try running an font utility to clean and inspect your fonts. Some have what is called font finagler, run that and if you have font Doctor. Just my thoughts. and make sure the distiller is set to embed all fonts
     
    cjwworld, Jul 2, 2009
    #2
  3. RichardK

    RichardK Senior Member

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    Errr...first things first ...didn't you get a proof where you could check for this?

    OK onto the problem...Sounds to me like you're running InDesign on a PC and your printshop is running Macs (or vice versa). The character maps aren't the same, those spurious characters you see are where the output PC or Mac hasn't got the correct corresponding character in that position in the map.

    The reason it looks fine to you is that the font and corresponding character map exist on your computer. Check out the glyphs palette in InDesign for that font and you'll see the map for the font - if you hover your mouse over a character the GID and Unicode will pop up. Ask your printshop to do the same and my guess is there'll be no character at that location.

    To get around this try exporting the affected pages via File>Export>PDFx1-A (this being the most RIP friendly flavour of PDF) and ask your printshop to proof it. NB embed all fonts must be checked.

    This is Adobe's preferred method of creating press quality PDFs rather than the PostScript/Distiller route.

    Good luck and let us know the outcome.
     
    RichardK, Jul 2, 2009
    #3