Help! HiRes PDF export inverts bitmap graphics

[StephanP]

Chaps,

Thank you all for your support, in particular thosw who have gone to the trouble of generating PDF's for me through various inventive ways.

I think the issue IS related to memory management on the part of Xara and Xara Support now have a nice 20-page .xar file to do further investigation and hopefully come up with a solution in the form of an upgrade. (XXP3.24 as well as XXP4?)

For the moment, one of my many attempts generated a correct PDF (83MB, so forgive me if I spare you the result) and I will be coming back with you once I've uncovered anything sensible about the right and wrong settings.

Stephan

[EJ]

Behzad, don't worry-no offense taken.
Stephan, you say you have a correct pdf of 83MB and other posts said 70MB or so.

My Print PDF is just over 7MB and the pre-press (commercial) pdf is just over 8MB. These are a tenth the size of the ones you guys are generating. I am concerned by this. Why the difference? and what makes your ones correct?

Can someone with one of these monsters put up a screen grab of where the difference might be? Is it in photo definition, or transparency or what. I have attached two screen grabs showing original xara and my PDF sections at the same size. In each case the xara original is the top one.

There do not appear to be significant differences in the PDF versus the original. However, I am happy to be shown that there are significant differences. If not, why are these monsters being produced?

Erik

[StephanP]

Stephan, you say you have a correct pdf of 83MB and other posts said 70MB or so.

Mine was produced at 300dpi and with no bitmap compression
The difference between the 70-odd MB and my 83MB could lie in the fact that mine included the bleed (incl. some page overflow bitmaps) and crop-marks and such.

Please note that I removed the .xar file from the original posting.
While the assistance has been much appreciated, I need to ask everybody who downloaded the file to remove it from their systems.


Stephan

[EJ]

Hi Stephan,
Original file removed.

However, my original questions remain. I am not talking about the difference between 70MB and 83MB, I am talking about the difference between 8MB and 83MB. That is enormous, especially if there is no significant diffrence.

My pre-press (commercial) pdf is just over 8MB. This one tenth the size of the ones you guys are generating. I am concerned by this. Why the difference? and what makes your ones correct?

Erik

[StephanP]

Erik,

I'm not a PDF expert. I just stumble over them every now and again

I just did some experiments with PDFCreator and doPDF.
Both produced significantly smaller PDF's in the same range as yours: 4-8MB with 300dpi rasterizing.
On the other hand, both showed significant flaws with respect to vector objects, but most importantly the colors.
So PDFCreator and doPDF - while producing elegantly small PDF's - are no option for me.
What tool do you use?

Stephan

[EJ]

Hi Stephan,
I used Primopdf version 4.0.1. The current version is 4.0.2 available from http://www.primopdf.com/.

I have used this driver, or an earlier version, when necessary for more than than two years. The company also makes the commercial Nitro PDF which claims to be the alternative to Adobe Acrobat.

I have looked at dozens of pdf printer drivers over the years and have found this one by far the best.

I'll be interested to hear your opinion if you test it against your others and your xara pdf file.

Erik

[behzad]

When you export as pdf/x then all colors onscreen are converted to cmyk so it will require more memory to store all colors.

I think when you get 8M it could be RGB that the files are saved as in your pdf.

[alexbozhenov]

Stephan,

Seems a very interesting case ) Can I have your .xar file? I didn't find a link to DL.

You have all pages in the one single .xar file?

I believe you have to produce PDF page-by-page and then merge all pages as one PDF file. But it's very interesting to see your original .xar file.