Workaround for Apple's Pages software to generate non-crap PDFs

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Apple's Pages software is getting used more and more to generate print-ready PDFs. It's a decent piece of software, but its PDF generation is for crap and can result in bad printing issues.

I've composed a workaround to make decent PDFs from Pages. This was primarily written because of problems Lulu had printing The Shadow of Yesterday.

The workaround's at http://www.anvilwerks.com/pages_workaround/.

[Per Fischer]

I get a time-out error trying to access the link.

On another note, I haven't got any good experiences trying to generate PDFs from non-Adobe software, at least not if you want to print from the finished file. I used to work for Adobe Acrobat support, so I may be biased here, but any problems printing especially professionally from PDFs were usually caused by such 3rd party PDF generators. Apple's built-in print to PDF is a good example of one of the more crappier ones, I am sorry to say being a Mac user myself ;)

I don't know if it's a problem with copyright and stuff, but Lulu could simply offer to generate the final PDF with Adobe Distiller from a Postscript file provided by the customer - that is the normal way to avoid fuck-ups. Trouble is, of course, that PS files are damn huge.

I don't know - just a couple of thoughts :)

Per

[Nathan P.]

I've been using OpenOffice to do quick PDFing, but I haven't tried printing them. Any word on that PDF quality? If it's better than Pages, there's a couple of OpenOffice ports available for Mac. I use NeoOffice/J, mainly because it's icon involves a pirate ship, and I have had no problems a'tall.

[Per Fischer]

OK, I can see the webpage now :)

Clinton's workaround should actually work from any application, not just Pages, so you could do the same from NeoOfficeJ I suppose.

Do you know what PDF settings/quality Preview uses when converting to PDF, Clinton? I suppose they are fixed.

Per