Trouble Printing to PDF with PNG files

[Guest]

Hi,

I am a big proponent of PNG files for placing diagrams and other graphics in
PPT presentations, particularly since the alpha channels are supported and
vector-sourced graphics are rendered so well. Well, I have sung the praises
of PNG to my colleagues and now I feel rather guilty because it has caused
some major problems for printing the PPT to PDF.

Our firm uses a dedicated network server to run Adobe Distiller to produce
PDFs. Whenever someone sends a PPT (which are usually 60-100 slides) that
contains PNGs, the file size basically explodes when it spools, tying up the
server so that nothing else gets processed until someone deletes the
offending file from the server. So that lets others use the server, but the
native PPT is still not converted to PDF. PDFs are preferred to share PPTs
with clients--don't ask me why, that's just the way it is.

So any thoughts on what's going on? This doesn't happen with other image
formats. If it matters, the PNGs are usually generated in Illustrator.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

-kelly

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hi,

I am a big proponent of PNG files for placing diagrams and other graphics in
PPT presentations, particularly since the alpha channels are supported and
vector-sourced graphics are rendered so well. Well, I have sung the praises
of PNG to my colleagues and now I feel rather guilty because it has caused
some major problems for printing the PPT to PDF.

Our firm uses a dedicated network server to run Adobe Distiller to produce
PDFs. Whenever someone sends a PPT (which are usually 60-100 slides) that
contains PNGs, the file size basically explodes when it spools, tying up the
server so that nothing else gets processed until someone deletes the
offending file from the server. So that lets others use the server, but the
native PPT is still not converted to PDF. PDFs are preferred to share PPTs
with clients--don't ask me why, that's just the way it is.

So any thoughts on what's going on? This doesn't happen with other image
formats. If it matters, the PNGs are usually generated in Illustrator.

You mention that you like PNGs because of the way they handle transparency.
Amen to that.

But most transparency effects produces PostScript from Hell when you print from
PowerPoint.

There are a few manual fixes you can play with but none I know of are really
practical for more than a few slides.

Hm. It never occured to me to try this but we have a little add-in called
Protect that converts PPT slides into slides with bitmap images of the original
PPT content. This might actually give you reasonable results. You can set
different resolutions to see what works best in the PDF.

Free demo at http://www.pptools.com/protect/