PDF Requirements and Best Practices

In support we always get asked the question, "What is the best practices for creating my PDF file" with this in mind our design / development have been working tirelessly on giving you some new information about the minimum PDF requirements and the best practices for exporting PDF documents when working in Zmags so you can get the very best and most compatible publication for our system.

PDF Document Requirements
- Minimum PDF Version: Acrobat 6 (PDF 1.5)
- Maximum size: 500 MB
- Maximum 0.5 MB / Page
- All pages must have the same dimensions
- Text which should be searchable must be text (not outlines or images)
- Editing password is required for password protected PDF Documents


Best Practice for Exporting PDF Documents
- Use Adobe PDF and the Zmags PDF Preset for optimal results
- Export for compatibility with Acrobat 7 (PDF 1.6)
- Disable Spreads
- Exclude Interactive Elements
- Rasterize all text layers.
- Downsample images to 200 pixels per inch (DPI)
- Disable crop marks (marks and bleed)
- Enable color conversion to destination with sRGB and an included destination profile
- Subset fonts when percent of characters used is less than 100%
- Disable Password Protection

We also like to highlight any limitations we have in the system and provide you with some workarounds, so with this in mind please find some common problems or limitations our platform has and how to resolve them.

Known Limitations
PDF Forms and Multimedia Objects (audio, video, and Font effects) are discarded
- Solution: Recreate the forms and multimedia in the Enriched within the Publicator.

Pages with a different size than the first page will be resized to the size of the first page
- Solution: Use the same page size throughout the PDF Document.

Spread PDF Documents with back and front side combined as the first spread won't be recognized
- Solution: Make sure that the first page is the front side of the cover page and the back side of the cover page is the last page in the PDF Document.

Rotated pages and Powerpoint Exports may show up incorrectly
- Solution: When exporting the PDF Document, use Print to PDF instead of export.