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FM 11 - Book Printing to .PS issue - Cause and solution

LEGEND ,
Sep 27, 2012 Sep 27, 2012

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From Kapil Verma, FM's product manager:

Subject: Response from Adobe - Print to .PS issue - Cause and solution

Hello everyone,

I am from Adobe and wanted to give you some information about the “Print to .PS” issue that has been reported in the forums recently. We have looked into this issue and found the cause. Today, we wanted to share it with you all along with a workaround solution in the interim. Furthermore, we are working on fixing this issue and expect to come out with a fix soon.

What causes the issue

This issue occurs when a user who is running FrameMaker11 in unstructured mode and tries to print a book, which was also created in the unstructured mode. This issue is not present when printing a Framemaker document, or when FrameMaker is running in structured mode.

Workaround

The workaround is to switch to structured mode (you can do so by going to Edit > Preferences > General and use the Product Interface dropdown to select “Structured FrameMaker”) and restart FrameMaker. This would be a one-time action and afterwards, FrameMaker will launch in Structured mode and you won’t face this issue.

This being said, we do however realize that many of you are working in the unstructured mode and wouldn’t like to see the additional structured menus and toolbars. To address this, we are providing a set of workspace, menu and toolbar files (attached with this message). With these files, a new workspace will be created in your FrameMaker structured mode and this workspace will only have the unstructured menus and toolbars. So, you can continue to work in a familiar environment with only the unstructured features that you are used to seeing. Please download the attached files and follow the steps below to copy these files in the relevant folders.

Steps to create the new “Unstructured” workspace when running in the Structured mode

  1. Copy Unstructured.fws in %appdata%\Adobe\FrameMaker\11\WorkSpaces\Structured’ folder
  2. Copy menus-unstr.cfg in %appdata%\Adobe\FrameMaker\11\WorkSpaces\Structured\menus’ folder
  3. Copy fmtoolbar-unstr.xml in %appdata%\Adobe\FrameMaker\11\WorkSpaces\Structured\toolbars’ folder
  4. Launch FM in structured mode and switch to the ‘unstructured’ workspace.

* Note: this would not remove DITA and S1000D menus. If you want to remove those menus as well, please write to me separately and I will be happy to send you those instructions.

Hope that this workaround works as a solution in the short term, while we work hard on fixing this issue for you. We hope to come out with a fix soon to this problem.

Thanks,

Kapil Verma

Sr. Product Manager - FrameMaker | FrameMaker Publishing Server

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Oct 04, 2012 Oct 04, 2012

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the new patch is out and this issue has been fixed

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Participant ,
Oct 04, 2012 Oct 04, 2012

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I was able to print 3 times in a row this evening without any crashes, so thank you very much! This is a huge relief - I have lost days worth of time on it and didn't realize how awesome it was to just push a button and have the pdf spit out in just minutes with no lock and recover files to clean up before I could reboot, pray and try again.

I was really hoping that after 3 months there would be more than the printing crash fixed, but as the install is about 2 secs long I guess it is just one or two files that got patched. Will there be another build out soon? The conditional text issues are the next worst of course, but the scrolling in the paragraph pod makes me more than a little crazy when I select one tag and it jumps up and picks another at random.

And I don't suppose this is a FrameMaker bug, but if I choose CMYK instead of RGB, the graphics are really screwed up in the pdf. Is that something to report to the Acrobat team?

-Laurie

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Oct 04, 2012 Oct 04, 2012

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are you not able to print choosing RGB?

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Community Expert ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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> And I don't suppose this is a FrameMaker bug, but if I choose

> CMYK instead of RGB, the graphics are really screwed up in the pdf.

Screwed up how?

Colors don't match?

If so, that's assured by the destructive Windows GDI API, which reportedly converts your non-EPS CMYK content from CMYK to Monitor RGB, and then back to CMYK. 8 of 32 bits of color precision are lost. Who knows what it does with values that are out of gamut. Conversion algorithm? Unspecified.

Windows is not a credible pre-press platform.

MacOS is, but Apple is trying to fix that.

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Participant ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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Yes, colors don't match in eps content and the few png tiny tiny icons I added in tables are completely missing. A few pages that were simply 8.5 x 11 graphics strangely have footers showing through, even though there are no footers on the masters of those pages. Weird. I will just leave it in RGB for now.

I more often do work that is online, but this project will actually be printed and bound in addition to being offered on-line. Are there things I should be doing to improve the product for printing, or maybe a source where I could learn more?

And thank you again for always being there with an answer...

-Laurie

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Advocate ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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Advocate ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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I'm not sure what happened. My previous reply posted as blank. Here's a

repost:

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Advocate ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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Weird. It posted blank again. Let's try one more time (live this time, instead of through the mail server):

panangle wrote:
===
I more often do work that is online, but this project will actually be printed and bound in addition to being offered on-line. Are there things I should be doing to improve the product for printing, or maybe a source where I could learn more?
===

Sending books to offset printing press is a whole different beast then printing online and requires additional knowledge and skills to be done right. (If sending to a digital press, the result might not be different than what you see from your laser printer.) It's much too large a topic to cover here, but here are a few key points:
 

1. Bitmap images should typically be set to 300 dpi. An image that looks good on screen at 72 or 96 ppi will look pixelated and horrible if printed that way. Vector graphics print at the native resolution of the device, which means that they may actually print at 2540 dpi on printing press. So they will look better on press than on screen, without further effort. 

2. You might want to look up best practices for handling screen shots, if you use them. If I remember right, you do not want to resample these captures. Instead, change the dpi setting to resize them.  So, if you capture them at 72 ppi, you may want to print them at 72 dpi. The result will be no more pixelated than the real thing.

3. Converting from RGB to CMYK can cause major surprises. Graphics that look great on screen may not print looking anything like it. (This is more important for photos than for pie charts or other images with solid colors). The gamut of a printing press is much smaller than the gamut of most monitors. Some on-screen colors cannot print because printing inks cannot duplicate them. When converting to CMYK, Photoshop needs to decide how to handle these out-of-gamut colors. You may need to adjust your graphics in Photoshop (with View> Proof Colors turned on) before saving them to get them within a safe CMYK gamut. Also look up "rendering intent" in Photoshop help to see choices for CMYK conversion that may drastically affect the result of the conversion. (Note: Some printers want you to keep graphics as RGB.)

4. Contact your printer for advice. They can tell you settings to use when preparing your files. 

5. Run a "preflight" routine in Acrobat Pro (I don't think Standard can do it) after you create your PDF. This finds errors that will be problematic for printing presses. 

A couple of good books:
1. Getting It Printed,  by Beach and Kenly: overview of printing processes
2. CMYK 2.0, by McCleary: Chapter 6, "The Steps," is a great review of readying an image for printing press. 

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Participant ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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Mike,

Wow - thank you SO much for a detailed answer! I really do want to learn this stuff, so your time spent trying to post it three times will most certainly bring you good karma. And a beverage of your choice should we ever physically be in the same place at the same time (which also goes more than double forArnis and Error7103).

I understood to only use eps files and I have except for a very few, all of which I have now converted, and I did know about the 300 dpi standard.  😉

I do create screenshots when I'm working on software help docs, so this one I knew as well - though it has been years since any of those have actually been printed...

This RGB to CMYK thing is mostly outside my realm of experience, but I learned a lot today with the link Arnis pointed me at.  

I searched for rendering intent in PS help and got wildly disparate results. Now I know a little more and found a site www.creativepro.com that looks to be another good resource. (Note: I try to be elaborate in my answers for others who may come along after searching for clues. I appreciate the extra info that goes into posts as that is my chief way to learn as a solo freelancer.)

And CMYK 2.0 ($21.99 on Kindle) is awesome. That will be my bedtime reading for a while 😉 Found a used copy of Getting it Printed (2004?) for $7.28 that I will have in a week or so.

I  always had a team of graphic designers who handled these kind of details, but now that I'm on my own, I am frequently shocked at how much I still have to learn...

Thank you for helping my education along.

Now if only I could get my project to compile me another pdf today...

-Laurie

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Community Expert ,
Oct 07, 2012 Oct 07, 2012

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> ... it has been years since any of those have actually been printed...

What is the principal delivery goal for your color work?

PDF viewing, or

physical printing?

If physical printing, the color model used probably doesn't matter as much as using only predefined library colors, whose precise names are known to the print shop or RIP, and making sure that those names survive into the PDF or PS that you provide to the printer. See

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4133598#4133598

for a bit of musing on that.

Our color goal is PDF view, so we use RGB, and tag images for color management during PDF render, to the sRGB profile. Colors match on screen (except text - tagging "everything" for color management is problematic).

Do you need to have color text?

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LEGEND ,
Oct 07, 2012 Oct 07, 2012

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@Mike,

It may be a function of your email client's reply configuration and if you had any quoting enabled. The forum software tries to be helpful and snips off spurious/long quotations and sometimes trips up on any right angled brackets used. Top-quoting can sometimes strip an entire message.

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New Here ,
Feb 12, 2014 Feb 12, 2014

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@All - I guess I get to chime in. The date today 2/12/2014. Arnis' last post for this thread was 10/7/2012. My current employer purchased FM11 10 months ago. This issue has not been fixed and still exists. The downloadable patch didnt work either. I am leaving my current employer at the end of this week and would really like to leave him with a functional template the can print out to pdf.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

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Community Expert ,
Feb 12, 2014 Feb 12, 2014

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@clownboy0293 – are you talking about the error printing an unstructured book in FM11 to PDF/.ps ? If so, that was fixed in the first patch for FM11 a while ago (BTW the same issue crept into the release version of FM12 this year, but it’s been patched as well now).

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LEGEND ,
Feb 12, 2014 Feb 12, 2014

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LATEST

What "issue" are you referring to? As Jeff says, the printing to .ps file in unstructured FM has long since been rectified. If you couldn't install your patches, then something else is amiss.

If you're referring to the colour shifts mentioned between viewing RGB vs CMYK PDFs, then that's not an issue, but rather a perception and a function of the tools used to look at the content. The CMYK PDFs are correct for print (reflective technology) and don't appear the same when viewed on screen (transmissive technology).

Also, it is no longer recommended to print to postscript and then convert to PDF in more recent versions of FM. The SaveAsPDF works just fine in a properly configured installation.

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Advocate ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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And I don't suppose this is a FrameMaker bug, but if I choose CMYK

> instead of RGB, the graphics are really screwed up in the pdf.

What do you mean by "screwed up?" If you're talking about colors being

off, try setting GetLibraryColorRGBFromCMYK=None in maker.ini.

The best way to handle CMYK graphics is to import them into FrameMaker

as EPS graphics. Otherwise, FrameMaker pumps them through the RGB

Windows GDI on output and color distortions can result. EPS files are

passed through to Acrobat untouched.

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Participant ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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I tried to answer how they were screwed up. Yes, as I noted, colors were off. 90 percent of the graphics are eps, but I have maybe a dozen png icons. Some, but not all of those png icons were missing. Will converting those to eps make a difference? I will try changing that setting and see what happens.

-Laurie

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Participant ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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So maybe the printing bug is not actually fixed...

I changed that setting in maker.ini, brought up the console, opened my book and chose CMYK. Still in Structured mode, though it is not a structured book.

When saving to pdf works, it takes between 12-15 minutes for the pdf to be generated. I checked in 10 minutes and it seemed to be hung (ie no new files listed in the bottom left corner as printing, stuck on one of the early ones).  I left it 30 minutes in total til I gave up and clicked in the console. Just got the OS dialog about the product no longer responding. I will go run a mif wash, reboot, and try to print it again.

-Laurie

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Participant ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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So I am sitting here now and (im)patiently clicking through the Document in Use dialog to Reset Lock and Open...truly my favorite dialog after spending what seems like lifetimes in it. <rolling eyes>

Admittedly, sometimes I just bag it and go delete all the .lck and .recover files in File Explorer as I gleaned that doing so didn't really have a detrimental effect from one of the threads in the forum - when I know like now that absolutely nothing changed since successfully printing it last night.  But still, I am going through them. About 6 files have come up with a message that they have unresolved xrefs, though again, nothing has changed since last night when they were perfectly fine...

After I get done clicking through the 60 windows, update the cross refs, run the mif wash, and try to print it again, I will come back and report. So in like a couple hours...;-)

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LEGEND ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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Laurie,

What criteria are you using for "colors don't match"? Do you have a calibrated workflow? Are you using a colorimeter device on the monitor, just eyeballing in Acrobat or using the Acrobat PrePress settings to look at the actual colour values?

Are the colors used within FM defined as CMYK? Are the EPS files in CMYK and do they have colour profiles attached? Which application created the EPS files?

What Distiller joboptions are you using when creating the press-ready PDFs?

PNG supports a CMYK model, so you can do a conversion on those files if required.

Tip: an inital SaveAsPDF might take a long time - seems to be some configuration and caching of the specific Distiller instance taking place. So if you've got a large book to do, first do a small single page file of some kind and then run the larger book. I've found that this seems to make a significant difference on my installation.

For general info and some details about how to use AcrobatPro's PrePress tools, you could download and have a read through Adobe's Printing Guide:

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/print/CS5-5-printing-guide.html

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Participant ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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Arnis,

Just comparing a pdf version printed earlier choosing RGB to the one with the CMYK setting by eyeballing it - the CMYK colors are washed out. Yes the colors within FM are defined as CMYK. As to the EPS, I couldn't swear that they were all defined in CMYK, but I will check out at least some of them. Most of the eps files were created in PS, some in AI, and a few were ones the client purchased (in eps format) so I couldn't speak to what application created those.

I choose High Quality Print in the joboptions.

So I will go through and convert the png files later today. Didn't seem like I should have to do that, but whatever helps.

And I will try your tip to save a single file first in just a bit. That one could be a wonder tip if it works for me. I've just completed opening, resetting the lock, saving, running a mif wash, rebooting my computer and trying another Save as PDF. And it is hanging on the same file again...I will rip out that file, recreate it, clean up all the files again and try to save just it, and then the larger book. Maybe the printing bug is fixed and some other bug is corrupting my files, but until I see it print again, I have my doubts about the fix.

And I appreciate the prePress tip even more. I have it sitting on my Kindle now and I will read it in between trying to get this book to print again...

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LEGEND ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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Laurie,

Comparing RGB to CMYK outputs of the same thing will appear different on screen and in print depending upon the colour gamut (range) of the devices, the calibrations in the workflow, etc. In many cases, it's more (black-)art, than science.

The High Quality Print options are not really suited for press-ready files (no colour working spaces are defined). You really need to get input from your print provider on what they require for their workflow in your PDFs.

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Participant ,
Oct 05, 2012 Oct 05, 2012

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I asked the client previously, expecting to get specifics. All she said was " I just give them (the printer) a pdf...."

As I said, I've personally done little with print medium before, but I did understand that there should be some particular profile. After I read through this prePress stuff, hopefully I will know more. And the color outputs were not as disturbing as the weird artifacts and missing graphics...

But thank you, you have been most helpful. I am back to just wanting to get the #($(*#* thing to print again.

-Laurie

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