Posted by Art_MD on 5/11/05 1:22pm
Msg #37137

Adobe - what is "flattening" N/M

Reply by Joan-OH on 5/11/05 2:17pm
Msg #37156

No Idea. but....

I know exactly what you're talking about. Doesn't it just drive you NUTS!!!! Starts doing this about 1/2 way through the file and you have to go through the process for every page. I think it has something to do with the way they are scanned. The problem sure isn't on my end. I've run into this 3 times. Frustrating!

Joan-OH

Reply by Art_MD on 5/11/05 2:20pm
Msg #37157

Re: No Idea. but....

Just had an 80 page file. Did "flattening" on about 10 page - 5 sec to do a page. Not consecutive 1 here, 2 there 7 another place.
Printed out fine - checked all pages.

Art

Reply by Philem on 5/11/05 3:03pm
Msg #37165

Re: No Idea. but....

"Flattening" is a fancy way of saying "making the fonts work with your printer." Now, I know that PDFs are supposed to encapsulate all the font info, but we've all seen times when we've opened a PDF and gotten a message along the lines of "Unsupported fonts. Use defaults?"
<rolling eyes>

-Jim

Reply by Art_MD on 5/11/05 8:10pm
Msg #37215

Thanks Philem

I just one of those people who want to know why, even if knowing doesn't do a thing for me.


Art

Reply by Gerry_VT on 5/12/05 3:16am
Msg #37261

Try looking at some information I found on the Adobe website:
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/315727.html

It says that PDFs can contain transparent objects. I imagine that if an author wanted to put the word "COPY" diagonally across a page in big grey letters, the author might use a transparent object. The object might be stored once in the PDF but have to be applied to dozens of pages. The process of applying the transparent object to many different pages and determining the final appearance of each page is "flattening".

I don't know much about this process in Adobe, but this usage roughly corresponds to the way the word is used in computing in general.