Printing Double Sided??

[j***@adobeforums.com]

I am working on a project in Illustrator 10 that requires me to print double sided. I did not create the original file, and I now find out that Illustrator is not the program to use to create multi-paged pieces. That aside, however, I am still trying to figure out if double-sided printing is a possibility in Illustrator. The pages are separated in Illustrator now with page tiling, but when I attempt to print the pages double-sided, it will only print them as two single-sided pages (and yes, the printer I'm priting to does print double-sided pieces).

Another option that I have tried was to print the file to PDF, open the two pages in Adobe Acrobat, combine the two into one file, and then print double-sided from Acrobat. While this works, the problem there is that when I print to PDF, the quality of the text in the piece is lessened. When discussing this problem with a friend, they said that this problem is because the vectors that are used in Illustrator cannot be converted to PDF in Acrobat. Not being a veteran Illustrator user, myself, I am not sure how to get around this.

If anyone has an ideas, I would be happy to hear them. And if what I'm trying to accomplish simply cannot be done - then I'm prepared to accept that reality!

Thanks.

[H***@adobeforums.com]

Joshko,

While this works, the problem there is that when I print to PDF, the quality
of the text in the piece is lessened. When discussing this problem with
a friend, they said that this problem is because the vectors that are
used in Illustrator cannot be converted to PDF in Acrobat.




Your friend is misinformed. PDF retains vector elements, including text, in vector form. In fact, the native Illustrator AI file format is now PDF-based.

If text appearance is degraded in Acrobat, check your preferences. Since you did not specify Acrobat version, I can't give you specific instructions, but the idea is to find smoothing options and turn on all of them. (Note that this only affects viewing on the screen; printout is unaffected and should always be smooth.)

Since you have Acrobat, I think that's the best to do double-sided printing.

=-= Harron =-=

[j***@adobeforums.com]

I'm using Acrobat 6.0. In regard to your suggestion:

"Note that this only affects viewing on the screen; printout is unaffected and should always be smooth."

When I have printed via Acrobat, the text was fine while viewing, but it was the actual printed version that was lessened in quality. The text was not comprised of solid lines as it was when printed in Illustrator, but instead was made up of small dots - almost grainy-like. While the grainy final output would be good enough for most purposes, I can't afford to have a lessened-quality final product for this project. It was seem that quality was lost when the file was transfered from an .eps in Illustrator to a .pdf in acrobat (which may be true being that the file size changed from 5,427kb as an EPS to 18kb as a PDF).

If further explanation of my actions is needed, let me know. I'm new to the Illustrator realm and am not entirely sure what infomation would be helpful to solve the problem.

~Josh

[H***@adobeforums.com]

Josh,

...the file size changed from 5,427kb as an EPS to 18kb as a PDF




I'm going to assume you mean KB (kilobytes) rather than kb (kilobits).

Sounds as though you have embedded (as opposed to linked) raster elements in your Illustrator EPS file and that you have save-to-PDF options set to a high degree of JPEG compression. This would indeed reduce the image quality of the PDF with respect to the Illustrator original... but only for raster elements; vector elements should not be affected.

Do you have semi-transparent elements in the background behind your text?

=-= Harron =-=

[j***@adobeforums.com]

The file is comprised simply of text, and not even a significant amount at that. As previously mentioned, my Illustrator knowledge and vernacular is limited, but in reference to the "semi-transparent elements" and "embedded rastor elements", I wouldn't think that there is anything else included in the file due to its simplicity. Whoever created the original file had an even lesser understanding of Illustrator than I did, so they probably would have taken the easiest route possible to create it.

When you mentioned the "save-to-PDF" option, I've found that I get a different outcome when I do that then when I "print to PDF". "Saving" to PDF will save the whole artboard as one file, whereby disregarding the page tiling and scaling - which does not help me in the least. It is when I print to PDF that I am able to save the individual page tiles as separate PDF files in Acrobat, and keeping the new files to the scale as the originals. But once again the problem is simply the quality.

Thoughts?

~Josh

[j***@adobeforums.com]

I am not certain how to post the files onto server space (and probably would not want to do so anyway), but I could easily email the files directly to you. If you are willing to do that, feel free to email me at the below address.

Thanks.

~Josh
***@bssf.com

[H***@adobeforums.com]

So you are printing to Adobe PDF (formerly known as Acrobat Distiller). That's fine.

At this point, I cannot explain why you are seeing degraded text quality when printing from the PDF.

Can you post the files in question (the EPS and the PDF, preferably zipped into a single archive) up to a server space and provide us with the link?

=-= Harron =-=

[J***@adobeforums.com]

I believe it may be a question of Distiller settings (embedded fonts/resolution), but I do not know how to adjust them (if possible) in Illy; it has just worked for me.

What happens if you drag the cursor over some of the text? If the text is clean and with a baseline, it is live and editable; if there is no baseline, and the letters are filled with antlike things (anchor points), your someone has created outlines, and the text may become less nice.

[H***@adobeforums.com]

Josh,

I received your files.

1. Text Output Quality Issue -- I printed out both your EPS and PDF files on two printers, a monochrome Postscript laser printer (Apple Laserwriter) and a non-Postscript inkjet printer (Epson 1270 via its native driver). In all instances, the text was sharp and clean. I did not have the exact fonts that were used in the document, so I had to use close substitutes for the Illustrator document. (The PDF file required no font substitution because you had embedded the required fonts.) Other than the differences cause by such substitution, the text was of equally high quality whether I printed from Illustrator or Acrobat.

Since all of the type was indeed text (not outlines nor rasterized), I can only conclude there are some print-time settings, either in Acrobat or your printer driver, that is causing the degradation.

2. File Size Issue -- I removed all unused color swatches, brushes, symbols, and styles from the Illustrator EPS file, but that trimmed a mere 100KB from the 5,427KB original size. I did notice that there were a number of seemingly superfluous elements in the document, so I copied and pasted only the two main blocks of text into a new document and resaved as EPS. That brought the size down to 1,410KB, which is more palatable.

By comparison, your original EPS file saved to native AI format (with PDF compatible on, compression on, font embedding off, and ICC profile embedding off) produces a file only 31KB in size. Moral of the story: save in AI format unless you have some good reason to save as EPS.

My versions were the same as yours (Illustrator 10.0.3 and Acrobat Pro 6.0).

I wish I could completely solve the mystery, but, in the meantime, you can be reasonably certain your PDF files are fine.

=-= Harron =-=