In the process of compiling the sixth Evil Inc book, I ran across the solution to a problem that’s been plaguing me ever since I started printing in color.

I lay out my books using Adobe InDesign and export a PDF to send to the printer. In this case, the printer, Transcontinental, gives me a “PDF preset” to use so the PDF is created to their standards.

Once I uploaded the PDF, I was alerted that some of the images were presenting at a low resolution.

I know this isn’t the case because… well, heck, because I’ve been doing this kind of work for twenty years now. 🙂

So I started hunting around, and I finally found the culprit. Part of Transcon’s PDF preset — in fact, part of practically every PDF preset — has image compression built in. After all, that’s what a PDF file does… it compresses the document for easy use.

But I’m not looking for easy. I’m looking for quality.

So I modified the PDF preset and — viola — my resolution problems disappeared.

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