Having Trouble with Pagemaker 7

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya guys,

I'm having some real trouble with my Pagemaker software.  I've got my games layed out in the regular pmd format and they look great.  I print them on my printer and it comes out fine.  I export it to a PDF file and all the graphics have their right halves chopped off.  It's weird!  Anyone know what can cause this?  All help and advice is GREATLY appreciated.

Peace,

-Troy

[Troy_Costisick]

One more thing.  You can check out the PDM file here: Cutthroat PMD  And you can check out the PDF file here: Cutthroat PDF.  If ya got any suggestions I'm all ears! :-)

Peace,

-Troy

[MatrixGamer]

I've had similar problems with Pagemaker. I got the Adobe Creativity Suite this fall and thought - Pagermaker - that's an Adobe product I can probably go from that to PDF using Acrobat - easy. Well - no. It doesn't work. They are not compatible. I had to transfer them into InDesign before it would work.

I don't know why this is but you are not alone with this problem. It is a real bummer, I like Pagemaker more than InDesign but now I've made the switch because I want to sell PDFs.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

[David Artman]

(Brief theory point, for background: Pagemaker isn't intended to be used for book layouts; it is a per-page layout program that shines at making magazines, brochures, catalogs, and other publications that tend to have highly variable design, page-by-page. InDesign, FrameMaker, and other DTP tools are designed to make book production easier, and are focused on things like footnoting, marginalia, and text flows from page-to-page. Long story short, you shouldn't make a book with linear or structured reference or narrative content in Pagemaker.)

I think you should search on this site and on Adobe's site for information about Distiller, AdobePS, and printing to PS. ANY program that generates output to a printer can make a PDF, if your Distilling environment is setup right and you print to PostScript and then Distill the PS file.

What has probably happened to you is that the Job Options for PDFMaker (which is a sort of shoddily setup "PostScript printer driver" with a push-to-Distiller backend process) are set to compress the images somehow, and the compression is going pear-shaped. I have had that issue once myself (with graphic artifacts being added to some images) and I brute-force solved it by setting my Job Options to NOT compress. It made the PDF 90 MB, but it was perfect. And hard drive space is CHEAP, now.

Basically, in an ideal world, you'd be using InDesign or FrameMaker or Scribus and you have a properly setup Acrobat environment, complete with a Distiller printer (probably using the PPD of the target printer at your POD). But even with what you've got, you should be able to make a PDF.

Welcome to Adobe's world--I've been banging my head on various Distiller and Acrobat production problems for about 8 years, now, and it never seems to get any easier;
David