Flattening Your PDF

Sometimes after uploading your PDF, you may notice lines or shadows on your images. Text might be a little blurry when zooming in, or certain things may be the wrong color. This sort of issue can be caused by overlapping text and image layers in the PDF causing the converter to become confused, what we refer to as a "transparency" problem.

To avoid this sort of problem happening again, please be sure to use our InDesign presets when exporting PDFs. You can download these presets at the bottom of the article

Also if you have Adobe Acrobat it is possible to save as optimized PDF which will perform transparency flattening and can fix the issues described above.

But if that doesn't help, your next option is to try "flattening the PDF". This simplifies all text and image layers in the file down to a single layer which is easier for the converter to process.

Flattening a PDF in Windows (with Adobe Acrobat):

1) Open up your PDF in Adobe Acrobat Professional (not InDesign).
2) Click File > Print > Select "Adobe PDF" as the printer > Click OK.
3) You will be prompted to save the new print. Use a different file name.
4) Don't touch anything while the document is "printing", as this can cause errors.
5) Upload this new print instead of the original PDF.



The above procedure works best with Adobe Professional 7 or 8, if available.

Flattening a PDF in Mac OS X:

1) Open the PDF file in Acrobat Professional and use the "Save As" from the 'File' menu.
2) Using the "file type" drop-down menu, choose to save as a postscript file.

Note: If the "Save As" command is not available, select "Save As PDF" instead.

3) Specify a location to save the file.
4) Once the postscript file has been created, open Acrobat Distiller.
5) Be sure you are using either the standard settings, or the Zmags presets (see link above).
6) Drag the postscript file into the Distiller application window.
7) Acrobat Distiller will process the postscript file and generate a new PDF. Use this for uploading instead of the original PDF.

Zmags PDF Presets: