Business Card Help

rscosworth

rscosworth

rscosworth

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Joined
18 Oct 2002
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Glasgow
Guys,

Looking for some help if possible, I require some business cards for work but the company requires a minimum order and we submitted an order last month before realising I needed some.

I have the template as a .pdf but when I try to upload them to somewhere like VistaPrint it advises that it has an 'unembedded font'

I have tried exporting the image from Acrobat as a JPG but it really looses the sharpness of the image and it needs to look professional.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can embed the font within the PDF while still retaining the quality of the image?

Thanks
 
If a rasterized format is okay (ie JPG), then why not save it in a lossless or higher quality format - PNG, for example?
 
the problem is you'll be rasterizing to 72ppi or something similar. Your printer will probably want 600dpi or higher. You can use ghostscript to rasterize a PDF very nicely indeed.

Get Ghostscript installed and then run this command:

Ghostscript commands to render a PDF to JPG.
"C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.61\bin\gswin32.exe" -q -sDEVICE=jpeg -dBATCH
-dNOPAUSE -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=2599 -r300 -dJPEG=100 -sOutputFile=output%04d.jpg input.pdf 2>&1

(All one line)

This will read input.pdf and output jpegs named ouput####.jpg where #### is a zero-padded 4 digit number.

-dJPEG=100 is quality from 1 to 100. Can also probably do PNG if changed to PNG.

Note this command allows extraction of page ranges, so to convert a whole PDF document one must supply the start page and the end page of the PDF.

How to extract the page count with Ghostscript is not known at this time. Maybe Imagemagick might work with the -identify command.

Also, with the above command the output numbering will always start at 1 regardless of page start number.

Good link: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Devices.htm
 
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whitecrook said:
the problem is you'll be rasterizing to 72ppi or something similar. Your printer will probably want 600dpi or higher. You can use ghostscript to rasterize a PDF very nicely indeed.

Get Ghostscript installed and then run this command:
Click to expand...


Ta, or I could just pop over and you could do it for me. About 2miles as the crow flies....lol
 
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If you have Illustrator - right click the font and choose 'Create outlines'. This will convert it from a font to a series of shapes - thus removing the dependency on said font.

edit: save this as a copy - you dont want to overwrite your original, otherwise it makes it difficult to change the text!
 
SoapSurgeon said:
If you have Illustrator - right click the font and choose 'Create outlines'. This will convert it from a font to a series of shapes - thus removing the dependency on said font.

edit: save this as a copy - you dont want to overwrite your original, otherwise it makes it difficult to change the text!
Click to expand...

Just tried this but it makes the letter 'I' stick out like a sore thumb for some reason. Is anyone willing to take a look at the original and see what they can do for me?

Thanks
 
Hmmm it shouldn't do, it should look exactly the same as the text? It could just be adobe acrobat rendering it incorrectly? Have you tried printing it?

edit: like this?

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/329366

edit2: quick read of that thread suggests it is a rendering bug and it prints fine. So it depends on what you need it for. In this case you're only printing so it should be fine, but someone suggests that for electronic distribution you should try embedding fonts - i've not done this my self so cant help, sorry.
 
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Hey,

I have tried printing and it does print ok but does not retain the fonts. I am really hopeless at these tools and causing me headache :-(
 
rscosworth said:
Hey,

I have tried printing and it does print ok but does not retain the fonts. I am really hopeless at these tools and causing me headache :-(
Click to expand...

Outlining won't retain the fonts, it converts the text to their shapes so its just another shape layer, which is why it's used for sending to print. The thicker vertical shapes are normal and will print fine.

If you want to retain edit ability then you need to keep an original version and save out outlined versions.
 
gord said:
Outlining won't retain the fonts, it converts the text to their shapes so its just another shape layer, which is why it's used for sending to print. The thicker vertical shapes are normal and will print fine.

If you want to retain edit ability then you need to keep an original version and save out outlined versions.
Click to expand...

What I mean is that I have printed and it does not retain the shapes, it has changed it to a normal font by outlining and then saving as PDF.

I am really probably the worst person at graphics related issues!
 
install pdf creator
configure for high resolution printing
open PDF
Print to PDF
???
profit

Host the file somewhere with a screenshot/scan of a printed card and I can take a look.
 
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rscosworth said:
What I mean is that I have printed and it does not retain the shapes, it has changed it to a normal font by outlining and then saving as PDF.
Click to expand...
Something wrong there then as converting text to outlines is the complete opposite. It basically makes it so there aren't any fonts in the document. :confused:
 
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