9 replies to this topic

[Hans van der Maarel]

Hi everybody,

Just produced a PDF file as proof for one of my clients and to my surprise some of my symbols disappeared. Not all of them, and of the ones that disappeared, other symbols on the same layer with the same symbol still were there. E.g. of all the symbols on my 'cities' layer, about half disappeared.

Sound familiar to anybody?

[BEAVER]

I make PDFs all the time from AI SC2. Never had any problems with symbols.

[Hans van der Maarel]

Hmm...

Had to expand the symbols to make it work. Odd...

[Martin Gamache]

Hi everybody,

Just produced a PDF file as proof for one of my clients and to my surprise some of my symbols disappeared. Not all of them, and of the ones that disappeared, other symbols on the same layer with the same symbol still were there. E.g. of all the symbols on my 'cities' layer, about half disappeared.

Sound familiar to anybody?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I had this happen to me quite a bit recently.

[ELeFevre]

I haven't run into the problem of "disappearing" symbols, but I have had circlular symbols print as octagons (last Friday), which is really confusing?

Hans,
Will the symbols print correctly if print directly from the .ai file?
I would try exporting your symbols as a library and placing them all into a new 8.5x11 test print and see what happens. This is one way to rule out whether or not you have a corrupt symbol...which can happen.

[Hans van der Maarel]

Will the symbols print correctly if print directly from the .ai file?

I haven't tried that.

I would try exporting your symbols as a library and placing them all into a new 8.5x11 test print and see what happens. This is one way to rule out whether or not you have a corrupt symbol...which can happen.

Okay, but only some of the instances of the symbol were omitted, not all of them. It only happened in a certain portion of the map too. Everything on the top half was okay, bottom half was missing those symbols.

I'm guessing it's something in the PDF mechanism. When I saved it as an Illustrator file + PDF compatability (adding ~50 megs to the filesize) and opened that in Photoshop, I got the same result.

[Rick Dey]

I've found I just don't trust saving a file to pdf from Illustrator to not lose some random symbol or piece of type. If the file is going outside I distill it. The extra couple of minutes to save as eps and then drop through Distiller is well worth it to be sure that the client is going get what I created. The added bonus is that the file will almost always be substantially reduced in size.

[Hans van der Maarel]

Grrr...

Even after expanding all symbols, there's still some missing. I'm going to give Distiller a try next time...

[Hans van der Maarel]

Okay, just got around to trying the Distiller way. Works a charm. Reasonably fast, the PDF looks great, no missing symbols as far as I can tell and it's about 3/4 of the size of the 'save as' PDF (28 vs 40 Mb)

[A. Fenix]

Okay, just got around to trying the Distiller way. Works a charm. Reasonably fast, the PDF looks great, no missing symbols as far as I can tell and it's about 3/4 of the size of the 'save as' PDF (28 vs 40 Mb)

Hi Hans!

I've just run into a similar issue using CS3. Oddly, all of my highway symbols have disappeared after saving the file as a .pdf to also share with clients. What's equally strange to me is that now my .ai file is also missing each of my highway symbols. I was on deadline and so had to use the Illustrator default symbols for the finishing touches of this map. At this point I have no option but to replace each of the highway symbols, and then try the Distiller method. I'll post again if I discover anything worthwhile to share with the group.

I hope you are well and happy