Where has the pdf file gone?

[dogbone]

I'm trying to print a pdf that shows the separations out of Illustrator.

In the output I have selected host based separations and pdf as the printer and the default pdf as the PPD.

When I select 'print' I do not get a dialog box but I just get the printing bar (see pic below). It is on screen for about 2 seconds.

But I can't find any pdf anywhere to open up. I was told that when I hit print I should get a dialog box asking where to save but that doesn't happen.

Any clues?

 

[dops7107]

I'm a bit unclear as to what you are doing. Are you printing a PDF from Illustrator? Are you using the OS X pdf output or are you using Acrobat Distiller? I assume what you are doing works just fine with other files?

 

[Blue Velvet]

Try this:

When in the Illustrator Print box, first go to Page Setup (bottom left button) and make sure that Adobe PDF and the correct paper size is selected there.

Then, next go to the Printer button. Choose Adobe PDF and in the pop-up menu beneath that, where it says 'Copies and Pages' choose Output Options and check the 'Save as file' box and select PDF.

 

[dogbone]

OK, it almost worked.

Just to be clear what I am trying to achieve, I'm hoping to end up with a pdf *file* that contains the two separations that are used on the job.

OK I went to the page set up and I get a dialog box saying that "the page set up dialog box is provided by the operating system", ok I continued on from that and change the printer from my connected printer to PDF. So that bit went OK.

Then I went to the Printer button and got the same dialog box which I continued on from, this indeed brought up a slightly different set of options where I set the printer as PDF and there is the drop down menu called 'copies and pages'...

But there is *no* 'Output Options' to select, bummer. There are a whole bunch of other options the only one that looked remotely like it might be something was one called PDF options but all that did was print out a single page colour pdf.

I don't know why the Output Options are not in the drop down menu. I'm using Illy CS and I've got acrobat 6 and acrobat distiller 6 installed.

I've never used 'distiller' and I've never tried to output separations as a file before. Usually I just output to a full cmyk pdf file and let the printers make the seps. But this time I'm just using a two colour job and I wanted to see what the seps look like.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Since you've got Acrobat Pro, set up and choose Adobe PDF as your printer and PPD. Print to postscript and dump into Distiller.

More info in this thread.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/173016/

Don't use OSX's PDF printer.

Edit: And when I say 'dump' I literally mean drag the postscript file onto Distiller's window.

 

[dogbone]

I'll have a look at that but I have managed to get what I wanted another way.

I set the Illy file up in InDesign (it needed to be 3 up anyway) and output a pdf with press defaults and then opened that file up in Acrobat and was able to then view the seps. Whew!, thanks for your help.