I start with this: I loathe and despise Adobe and Acrobat, though I have purchased each new each new Acrobat version for the last five or six years.
I have a very simple project--a literary magazine, printed 5 1/2 x 81/2 with all black inside (done in Pagemaker 7 now) and a 4 color cover (also PM7).

It's printed at MacNaughton Gunn in Michigan. I send them PDFs made from the Pagemaker files and they print. I'm almost certain they have to do some conversion and preflight stuff that they don't really tell me about.

Anyway, what I'm trying to find out is, given my minimal needs, would a program like Nitro PDF Professional work just as well as Adobe's gargantuan Acrobat 9? or is Nitro Pro UNABLE to prepare PDFs suitable for press printing?

Thanks.

I've assumed that it was wise to keep up with the releases. PM7.0 comes with Acrobat/Distiller 5, if I remember correctly and dosen't work very well.

I do a few other things (posters, postcards, etc.) that get printed at commercial printers, and if I could find any program that could handle the needs (to provide the printer with print ready PDFs or close enough so that they can work from the PDFs) I erase Acrobat and ditch all copies i own (way too many).

I may be using a much-too-sophisticated product (Acrobat) when my needs are pretty simple. I saw this Nitor PDF today and my school sells it, so I bought it for $79, but then when I carefully read the box it says nothing about prepress, which makes me worry that the PDFs that it outputs are fine when going to a laser printer, or an inkjet at home, but maybe mot fine when going to a regular print shop (to do the magazine guts and the 4-color cover) or to a Quick Print place to do B&W and color posters, some of which have graphics, etc.

Hey Frederick,

Chris here from Nitro. Our Nitro PDF Professional and Express products are
not targeted at professional printing users.

Our GDI based PDF creator cannot create PDFs using the CMYK colour space. It
does a brilliant job of everything else though :)

Our free PrimoPDF product can create PDFs using the CMYK colour space
though. You might want to download that and give it a shot (it's based on
Ghostscript).

www.primopdf.com

--
Chris Dahl - Chief Technology Officer
Nitro PDF Software
www.nitropdf.com
_____________________________________

The original Acrobat(r) alternative,
and the easiest to use PDF software, period.

"Product of the Year" - PC User
"Product of the Year" - Small Business Technology Magazine


On 28/02/09 1:24 PM, "p-pdf-prepress Listmanager"

On 2/28/2009 9:13:47 PM, aandi wrote:
>Distiller 5 was pretty solid.
>What specifically was wrong
>with the PDFs it made? It's
>likely to be the best release
>to integrate with PageMaker's
>PDF export.

actually it's been so long since I used 5 I can't remember. If you're telling me I'm just as well off using 5 as 7, 8, or 9, I might just reinstall PM7 and 5 and give it another try.

That is, after I hear from my printer about the PDF I just made with PrimoPDF and sent him for checking.

Thanks for your suggestion!

I think you need to be very specific about what goes wrong. If you can be exact, we can give specific advice. Otherwise, I can only say that Acrobat Distiller, while it has had bugs, has generally been pretty reliable, and certainly as good as anything else. And I assume you only need to use Distiller.

Just some additional information to this matter:

I just printed PDFs of the same print advertisement to PrimoPDF, Acrobat 5, and Acrobat 7. Then I printed the three PDF's to my laser printer. Even to the laser printer the quality of the three PDFs is significantly different.

Without going into great detail I can say that the PDF produced by Acrobat 7 set to "Press quality" in the Distiller Settings area is significantly better than the other two. So much so as to be no contest. I attach the PDFs here (if I can) to demonstrate.
I hope these are not too big or otherwise contrary to the forum rules and regs, and, further, that they might be useful to someone. Thanks.

2010MRPoetrySeries-AWP7Hand-primoPDF.pdf

2010MRPoetrySeries-AWP7Hand-Acrobat5.pdf

2010MRPoetrySeries-AWP7Hand-acrobat7.pdf