Category: Techwriter
If you're saddled with an OSX workstation, whether it's a Mac Pro with a Dual-Core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz processor or one of the sexier new Macs Apple released recently, an earlier version of Adobe InDesign may experience issues exporting to PDF. The common symptoms are:
1. InDesign shutting down midway through exporting to PDF
2. An unusable 0KB PDF
3. An "Out of memory" error message
4. InDesign displaying an error message regarding an EPS or color profile
This issue is commonly caused by the following:
1. A poorly maintained MacOSX system
2. Conflicting Adobe libraries (such as when more than one version of an Adobe application is installed)
3. Memory management or RAM issues (which contrary to Apple cult members occurs more often than you might think)
4. EPS or JPEG image
The newer versions of MacOSX require less maintenance than the older releases especially in relation to workstations installed with Adobe products. However, a MacOSX system that hasn't seen much updates can be as difficult to work with as an aging Windows XP system.
Having more than one Adobe version (e.g. CS2 and CS4) of a product is occasionally unavoidable for some companies but it is not recommended. In general, it's a better idea to have a different Mac or even a Windows system devoted to an earlier version than to have two generations installed on the same Mac machine. Surprisingly, Windows handles two versions of an Adobe product better than OSX.
Out of Memory
The "Out of Memory" message that occurs when you are exporting a PDF in Adobe InDesign can be caused by a hugely complex vector image, InDesign file, or photograph that your MacOSX machine cannot handle. This isn't to say your Apple machine lacks memory to run InDesign properly. It's more of Adobe + Mac's ability to work together. Some of the steps you can do to work around this issue are:
1. Close out your applications and use the memory clear command from the Terminal. Unfortunately, if you're running a really old version of OSX or you're running a system with less than 2GB of RAM, these steps will hardly help in resolving this InDesign issue.
2. Reboot your system. This well-known Windows troubleshooting step may seem sacrilegious to the Mac faithful but it does temporarily resolve the "Out of memory" error message in InDesign. In most cases, it is enough to produce a usable PDF.
3. Avoid using images or vector illustrations created in a more recent Adobe product and then importing or using them on your earlier InDesign application. For example, if you were provided an illustration designed in Illustrator CS4 and you used the Place command to add it to your Adobe InDesign CS2 document, it may seem like the EPS or .AI file was imported properly. However, the PDF engine of InDesign may struggle to export the document with this image causing InDesign to shut down, produce a 0KB PDF file, or just display the "Out of memory" message. In this case, it's not the size of the image, illustration, or .INDD file that matters but rather the type of objects you import. Even legacy-friendly formats such as EPS and TIFF can cause issues for an old InDesign version if it was produced from newer software.
Continued in Cannot export to PDF using Adobe InDesign (MacOSX) Part 2
0 comments:
Post a Comment