PDFs from QuarkXPress 6.5

No need to fear these Jaws: they bring PDF production under the XPress hood.

One of the most praiseworthy additions to QuarkXPress 6.5 has been the needed provision of PDF generation from within the application itself. To this end, Quark incorporated Global Graphics’ Jaws PDF creation technology and have made it integral to the XPress application; no separate program is required.

The XPress implementation is somewhat limited, but it is highly useful, and there’s no need for Distiller to be present on the system nor does one have to have an OS that provides PDF output (Wintel users rejoice!). The resulting PDFs look good on screen and, depending on need, can be used to proof and to archive layouts.

Where Do You Find It?

The way to get a PDF of your layout is Via the File Menu, pulldown File>Export>Layout as PDF…, which gives the following dialog:

The PDF Export dialog from QuarkXPress 6.5.

What Quark essentially wants to know is, here, where you want the file put. If there are multiple pages, or if the user wants the layout exported as spreads, these can be specified in the lower part of the dialog box.

At this point, if the user wants to drop it and go, all that’s required is to click “Save” and the PDF exporting will begin with no further ado. After a couple of minutes (depending on speed of hardware), a PDF with the layout name will appear where the user directs (we like leaving ours on the desktop). The document is a PDF 1.4 file which is suitable for many uses and can be opened in Acrobat 5 or later, and opened up fine in Acrobat Professional 7.0.

What else can you do?

The seasoned PDFer may find that this seems very cut-and-dried. Is anything else available? How can we alter settings? There are two routes to this destination.

Firstly, in the PDF Export Dialog, note the “Options…” button, which is just below and immediately to the right of the “Pages” dropdown in the lower part of the dialog. Clicking that brings up another dialog box, titled “PDF Export Options for Layout n”, with five tabs:

• Layout Info, which allows the user to embed Title, Subject, Author, and Keyword metadata
• Hyperlinks, which specifies how hyperlinks in the layout are to be embedded and displayed
• Job Options, which allows specification of font embedding and subsetting and compression options for graphics
• Output, allowing specification of color output (Composite or Seps) and Print Color Models (B&W/Grayscale/CMYK/RGB/As Is/Device N) as well as OPI, registration and bleed
• OPI, allowing on/off for OPI and specification for TIFF and EPS images

QuarkXPress 6.5′s PDF Export Options dialog with the “Job Options” tab selected, allowing the user to specify image compression levels for the resulting PDF.

Put Your Images on a Diet

There is a great deal of control inherent in the Export Options dialog, and the prudent PDFer will spend a great deal of time working with the settings in the Job Options tab, which offers various levels of compression between Manual JPG and Automatic ZIP/JPEG, in five degrees for each (High, Med High, Med, Med Low, and Low), manual 4- and 8-bit ZIP compression, and upsampling/downsampling options to user-specified resolutions.

The compression technology implemented by Quark has been criticized for leaving overly large PDF files, but judicious use of the Job Options specifications can save a lot space. The test QXD layout we did massed 12.8 MB, and was about that large if exported with all defaults, but if High compression was selected for images in the document the resulting PDF was 420 KB (we also selected centered registration so we could have our crop marks-registration is specified in the Output tab, where mark offset can also be specified.

QuarkXPress Preferences dialog with PDF Options pane selected (Mac OS X 10.3.9

The Other Path

The second way is via Preferences, where default workflow and output options can be specified. The preceding way can be used for a single print, but if one wishes to set application-wide preferences this, of course, is the way to go.

To access them this way, call up the Preferences dialog and click on PDF in the sidebar. The pane provided allows the user to select between PDF file production or PostScript file rendering for distilling at a later time–there is also a way to specify an Adobe Distiller “Watched Folder” that the PS file can be automatically saved to. Virtual memory can also be set here, as can the automatic default formate for the PDF file’s saved name.

Of particular interest here is the “Default Options…” button. This button brings up the same Options dialog as the “Options…” button in the PDF Export dialog.

Ups and Downs

While the native PDF Export within the QuarkXPress 6.5 application is particularly welcome and seems to work basically well, there are a few caveats to keep in mind when using it.

First, the PDF repertoire is limited to just one version: PDF 1.4. As mentioned, this is the only version available, in contrast to Adobe’s InDesign which offers PDF/X versions. A great many workflows can succeed with 1.4, but some demanding users may find XPress PDF Export insufficient for their needs.

Second, use of PDF Export requires more than a bit of getting-to-know the Options interfaces. Accepting the defaults result in very large PDFs, but knowing what to compress will save you file sizes.

Third, PDF options cannot be captured as presets as it can with InDesign; they should be reviewed each time the document is exported to ensure compliance with what its wanted.

Fourth, and a little harder to pin down, are various reports of ‘unexpected results’ from the 6.5 PDF Export implementation. Our test file exported fine, and we had no problems outputting to a desktop printer (HP 6110 Inkjet) but some users have reported problems in printing on presses even though the PDF looked fine in Acrobat (the Quark Forums PDF topic has ongoing conversations on this and other problems). Query your service providers to see if they have any problems with XPress 6.5 PDFs.

There is hope on the horizon, though; QuarkXPress 7′s PDF Export promises to be more robust and ready for prime-time than 6.5′s (read Designorati’s review by Elisabetta Bruno here).

In the meantime, despite the 6.5 version’s flaws, XPress’s PDF Export is quite useful and a welcome addition to the program which stands to save the layout artist a step or two in the workflow battle. It’s well worth exploring.