The Trouble With PDF Proofing No One Likes to Talk About

While they do have a function in society, we tend to use PDFs in far more situations than they were intended. A mere three years after their inception, web usability expert Jakob Nielsen stated that PDFs should never be used online — a sentiment many feel holds true to this day. PDFs are finicky at best, and trying to find or solve quality issues during PDF proofing can be a lengthy, frustrating process.

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PDF: The Titanic of Filetypes

For better or worse, Portable Document Format (PDF) files are the standard format for viewing files online. PDFs were created so that virtually anyone with a computer could send, view, and print documents. This was revolutionary for file sharing in 1993, but almost thirty years later, the largely unchanged PDF is still on its maiden voyage and sailing ever closer to the proverbial iceberg.

Despite the growing number of issues with PDFs, they hold value in the right situations:

• Unlike program-specific formats such as Microsoft Word documents, PDFs work on all operating systems.
• You don’t need special software to open them beyond a free PDF reader.
• They look the same everywhere (at least in theory), making them the format of choice for government forms, legal agreements, employment forms, and other important files.

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Rendering: Taking on Water in the PDF Proofing Process

Rendering is the process of converting a file from one format to another. This is the mothership of PDF proofing issues — whether the file renders incorrectly, in poor quality, or not at all, it can be a designer’s worst nightmare.

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The Trouble With Typefaces

If the person viewing your PDF doesn’t have your chosen font, their PDF viewer will substitute it. The substitute might work fine, but it can also look very different from the original.

Solution:
Embed your typefaces. Embedding stores the entire set of characters in the PDF so the viewer sees the correct font, even if it’s not installed on their computer.

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The Quality Quandary

Quality issues are trickier to solve because they can occur at any stage:

• Designers often proof a file in its original format, then convert it to a PDF without re-checking.
• Low image resolution, incorrect export settings, or incompatible software can cause fuzzy results.

Solution:
Always do a round of PDF proofing after approval to ensure nothing has changed.

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Disappearing Layers

PDFs are made up of layers, and layers with transparency less than 100% may vanish when printed.

Solution:
Flatten the image before printing. Flattening removes transparency by merging layers into one, ensuring the printer sees all elements. Keep in mind this step should be done at the end, as it prevents independent layer edits.

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Solve the PDF Proofing Problem With Rasterization

Most PDFs are vector files (composed of lines and polygons). Rasterization converts these into a grid of pixels (like a photo). In Adobe Creative Suite, flattening will rasterize an image. Rasterized files can be saved as BMP, JPG, PNG, GIF, or sometimes PDF.

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Benefits of Rasterization

• Smaller file sizes without losing quality, making uploads faster.
• Better print results, as printers handle dot-based images more cleanly.
• Controlled resolution — using DPI (dots per inch) for print and PPI (pixels per inch) for digital ensures sharpness.

Tip:
Low DPI/PPI will cause blurriness when scaling, so save at a high resolution.

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Ashore Makes PDF Proofing a Breeze

One drawback to rasterization is that it usually requires expensive photo-editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. If all you need is rasterization for PDF proofing, that’s overkill.

Enter Ashore’s automatic rasterization feature:

• Convert vector files to raster files right in the app.
• Reduce file size without sacrificing quality.
• Ensure files look exactly as intended before and after PDF proofing.

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