Adobe Reader Falttening for 4 minutes before printing

[teknobilly]

Hey there Xara friends,
I am preparing PDF files to send to teachers. We are starting to use live copies and layers a bit more to create our PDF documents. However, after the PDF has been exported, when I try to print them with Adobe Acrobat the software goes into a flattening mode for 4ish minutes, which seems excessive. This is the dialog I have a beef with:


For the PDF Settings I'm using 1.6, I do like the added compression this has over using a older version like 1.3. The options are fairly standard, I prefer not to bitmap the text, there isn't that much in this document. Their flash cards. Bitmap live copy backgrounds, with single word on top layer. Bitmap tiling is on, other than that it's pretty standard.

Is there a way that the PDF can be optimized before going out to the client? You may ask why not just chill. The question comes from before we started using Live Copies and additional layers the printing from Adobe was far quicker.

Thanks,
Billy

[gwpriester]

This does not sound right. Even if you have a lot of graphics. Not sure what is gained by using a lot of layers though. Can you explain what you are doing here?

[teknobilly]

Found it.
In previous documents everything was on one layer. For this document I added BG layer for template graphics, a foreground layer for text, and another for copyright notices and stuff. From the looks of things it was only layers and the use of live copies for the BG graphics that changed.

I ran some tests and found it was a bitmap with transparency, on top of other objects that was causing the delay in flattening when printing from Adobe Reader.

To decrease printing time, I selected bg graphics that overlapped each other. In this case, a flash card BG and Graphics in the FG. Then I created a bitmap copy of that card, created live copy, and redistributed on the BG. This decreased the time to print dramatically and kept the PDF file size about the same.

Adobe Acrobat still reports it is flattening, but only takes a few seconds per page.

Billy

[gwpriester]

Thanks for the update.