"Industry Standard" pdfs for printers - software suggestions please

[elsiegee40]

Looks like we're going to have to shelll out for some proper software to design/create pdfs with properly embedded fonts, etc for sending to printers

What do other folk use please?

We need to run this on Windows XP - and the cheaper the better (free ware, she says optimistically, would be really cool!)

[Ric_]

Are you after something that edits the PDFs and allows you to do all the fancy stuff or just something to make a PDF for sending to someone for printing?

Acrobat is the only software I know of that has ALL the functions - the reasons for this are pretty obvious! If you just want to export to PDF you could use the native export in OpenOffice, the PDF plugin for Office 2007 or a PDF 'printer' such as CutePDF (see http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp - there is a free version!).

[elsiegee40]

At present we make up our ads in Word and then run them through a pdf generator.

We have pdf995 installed on one of the office machines, but that doesn't appear to do custom sizing... (I need to to look at this more thoroughly - we've only had A4 out of it so far)

To get the custom sized output we've used http://convert.neevia.com/, which has been fine until recently. However, it doesn't provide the whole thing that papers want - especially embedding fonts

Our advertising looks like being stepped up and as a result, we could do without the hassle of multiple emails between us and whichever print room to try and get the ad in a format they want each time!

[dhicks]

Originally Posted by elsiegee40

Looks like we're going to have to shelll out for some proper software to design/create pdfs with properly embedded fonts, etc for sending to printers

Might want to check out Global Graphics/Jaws for PDF workflow stuff. The phrase you probably want to search Google for is "pre-press" - you want your on-screen or self-printed materials to look exactly the same as the stuff you'll get back from the printers, so you want to calibrate your screen/printers so colours are properly matched up. Note: I used to work for Global Graphics - web site, systems programming and source code control, don't know anything much about printers.

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David Hicks