Designers Guide to Mac OS X Tiger

PDF/X

PDF/X is a set of standards designed to help you create PDF documents that print exactly the way you expect, regardless of what type of press your job is running on. Using the standards lets you create a document that contains text and graphic elements formatted in a predictable way so that your print shop knows how your job should run, once it's on press. The benefit of PDF/X is that it lets you create your documents with the confidence that they will print without any surprises.

PDF/X is actually a subset of the settings in the PDF format. Think of it as the lowest common denominator. When your document is output as a PDF/X-compliant file, you are using a limited selection of features that Acrobat offers. In essence, you are trading off some of the features a PDF can take advantage of for the flexibility of creating a document without ever knowing what type of output device it will ultimately be sent to.

Depending on the type of document you are creating, there are different PDF/X-compliant standards sets that you will use. All of them, however, describe specific components in your PDF documents: embedded fonts, included images, which color spaces you can use, bleed and trim marks, and overprint settings and trapping settings. They do not allow for file security, so don't add any password protection to PDF/X-compliant documents.

Let's run down the features of the different PDF/X formats you are likely to encounter.

Tip

The Adobe Creative Suite applications include output settings for PDF/X-compliant documents so that you don't have to build settings files yourself.

PDF/X-1a

The PDF/X-1a standard is intended for CMYK documents that don't include any color-managed elements. This is the standard that many publishers want if you are supplying a PDF version of an advertisement for a magazine or newspaper. It includes specific settings that are based on each PDF version.

PDF/X-3

The PDF/X-3 standard incorporates PDF/X-1a and adds support for color-managed workflows and RGB images. This is the format you are most likely to use if you are sending PDFs to a printer or publisher that works in a color-managed environment and wants to handle RGB or CMYK conversions in-house. This format also includes specific settings based on each PDF version.

Tip

The PDF/X standards do not support transparency. That doesn't mean you can't create documents with transparency effects; it just means that you'll have to flatten your images or documents that contain the effects before creating your PDFs.