[bmmp]

At my publishing company, we make Press PDFs all the time. But it is often time comsuming at two areas.

One area that is annoying is, of course, at Distiller. Our G4s do the job, but they are large jobs when finally exported from Quark. Besides increasing the Distiller memory (OS9) is there anything else I can do to speed up the PDF process?

The second is the Screen Redraw once the PDF is created. Often, Acrobat will redraw each photo, one at a time when you open the PDF, and with a ton of photos on the ad, it can take a while build.

Are there things that can speed up this process?
Thanks!

[spiznet]

I assume you have maxed out the system RAM, 1500mb
(3 512mb sticks costing 100$ each) is a cheap solution. Then set Distiller memory usage to 1GB.

-Mark Scott
Director of Technology
J/B Woolsey Associates
graphics that educate

[gadster]

Bmmp, have you tried changing the output resolution in the 'Settings' pane of the quark print dialogue? You might get just as good results using 600 or 720 dpi instead of 2400-dpi (depending on the job's production values, stock, screen-ruling etc.). This means quark prints the .ps file quicker and smaller. And Distiller has nowhere near as much data to chew through.

Big tip, place your 'raster' type images as tiffs, not eps. Works for me; 'Screen Opt' proofs are WAY smaller. I have never seen any advantage in eps bitmaps.

Also, don't use the 'export as pdf' Xtension (unless you have truetype fonts in your file). It's horribly slow, and takes over your whole machine. Print a postscript file and distill manually.

[bmmp]

gadster,

Your advise is awesome.
I did some tests, and Clipped tifs are nearly twice as fast as Clipped epses when PDFing. Awesome.

I also did notice a 1 sec faster difference between printing a PS to PDF file than the export to PDF option. But I can't completly stop using the extention because it's a little bit faster when naming the PDF than clicking on the Printer button and then Save As in the Print Dialogue Box.

I have a new question now, one that may be difficult to follow.
If you can figure this out, you are a rock star.
In the finder, I can select multiple Quark Documents. yeay, no big deal.
But with those documents selected, I can Command P and print them all to PS and then transfer them to a Watched folder for PDF-ing. This is great, but there is one serious problem. Distiller automatically renames the file with the same name, so no matter what, I always end up with a single PDF. Basically, instead of generating mutiple PDFs, Distiller resaves over the same one, over and over.

Prepress Suggestions?

[gadster]

Sorry, I haven't been here for a while. Glad to hear I was of some use to you.

As to your other question, How do you " transfer them to a Watched folder for PDF-ing "? If it is some automated method, distiller may be getting through each ps file before the next one arrives (with the same name?). If so, the only thing I can suggest off the top of my head is to change the distiller setting to 'keep ps file' instead of deleting it. This may cause the printer driver to create a new name for each file (eg: file.ps, file.1.ps, file.3.ps etc) since the ps files are still in the watched folder - which will force distiller to do what you want it to.