Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

Customize Adobe PDF settings

You may want to create custom conversion settings for certain jobs or output devices. The selections you make determine such things as whether the document fonts are embedded and subsetted at 100%, how vector objects and images are compressed and/or sampled, and whether the resulting PDF includes high-end printing information such as OPI (Open Prepress Interface) comments. Default settings files cannot be modified, but can be duplicated to help create new settings files.

Note: If the PDF is intended for high-end printing, ask your service provider for their custom .joboptions file with the recommended output resolution and other settings. This way, the PDF you give them will have characteristics optimized for your print workflow.

Create a custom Adobe PDF settings file

  1. Do one of the following:

    • In Acrobat Distiller, select one of the predefined sets of options from the Default Settings menu to use as a starting point, and then choose Settings > Edit Adobe PDF Settings.

    • In authoring applications or utilities, select Adobe PDF as the target printer—typically in the Page Setup or Print dialog boxes—and click Properties.

    • (Windows) In the Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box, click Advanced Settings in the Settings tab.
      Note: In Windows, you can switch to a different preset from within the Adobe PDF Settings dialog box. To do this, select Show All Settings at the bottom left and then select a preset from the list on the left.
      View full size graphic
      Adobe PDF Settings dialog box (Windows)

      A.
      Predefined Adobe PDF settings

      B.
      Options panel

  2. Select panels one at a time, using the folder icons in the list (Windows) or the tab buttons across the top of the dialog box (Mac OS), and make the changes that you want to apply.
  3. Save your customized preset in one of the following ways:

    • Click OK to save a duplicate of the custom preset file, which will automatically be renamed. For example, if you edit the Press Quality preset, your first customized version appears as Press Quality (1).

    • Click Save As, type a new descriptive name for the file, and click Save.

    The custom file is saved in (Windows) /Documents and Settings/[user name]/Application Data/Adobe/Adobe PDF/Settings, (Vista) User/[user name]/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Adobe PDF/Settings, or (Mac OS) Users/[user name]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/PDF/Settings

Delete custom Adobe PDF settings files

  1. In Acrobat Distiller, choose Settings > Remove Adobe PDF Settings.
  2. Select a custom file that you want to delete, and click Remove.
  3. Repeat step 2 as needed, and then click Cancel to close the Remove Adobe PDF Settings dialog box.