Missing artwork in PDF’s - disable OPI XT
Every week, I hear from someone that, inexplicably, artwork is simply missing from PDF’s of their newspaper pages.
To further confuse issues, the missing artwork appears in PDF’s of ads that were created in-house, not ones that came from outside sources.
So far, in every case, when I preflight the PDF, I see OPI present. So if you’re trying to troubleshoot bizarre problems with PDF’s, this could be the issue.
The OPI Xtension is only needed if you are working in an OPI server situation - you have an OPI server on your network where there are lots of huge images.
In that case, OPI workflow allows the use of low-res images in a layout for speed’s sake, and high-res versions are automatically substituted when you print or PDF.
This is possible because the PDF “remembers” the path and location of the high-res images.
But if you use OPI workflow, and then send the PDF’s off via FTP to a remote location to be printed, the path to the high-res images no longer exists.
Unless you know you need the OPI XTension, the easiest thing to do is turn it completely off. (When Quark is installed, the OPI extension is turned on by default.)
To turn off the OPI XT, just uncheck it in Utilities > XTension Manager and restart the program. This won’t delete it, and you can recheck it at anytime, but now you won’t have to be sure to uncheck it everytime you place a graphic on a layout.
By the way, if you’re creating PDFs from Quark layouts with Acrobat Distiller, be sure to turn off “Preserve OPI Comments” in the Advanced panel of your Distiller settings as well.