PDF Export Settings

PDF Export settings is a list of pre-defined settings for the PDF-output.
You can create new groups of settings. These settings can be used to generate PDFs (In the editor or API) using this set of preferences.

Please note that the policy of PDF generation for CHILI is to generate files which contain all relevant information for production workflows, but may require optimization or conversion in backend solutions. The PDF files contain valid colors (spot, CMYK, lab, ...), vector text, images with embedded icc profiles, and all other information needed to transform the PDF based on your output devices. We do not however put a lot of stress on image resampling, color conversions, etc.

Settings

On the left panel you see a list (or just default when you have none defined) of settings.
These settings have the names you specified.

Behind each setting is a set of preferences. These preferences are grouped in collapsable parts.
Selecting one on the left, show the details to the right.

In the general part, you can change the name and choose the version of the PDF output engine.

Document

Preferences you can set on the document part:

• Create single output file

• Server location Specifies the location where the pdf file will be saved after creation. Patterns can be used to have part of the path created automatically

  In this case: D:\CHILI Publish\{6} CHILIData\{5} Environments\{4} Environment name\{3} Resources\{2} Documents\{1} Parent Directory\{0} document name
  {0} = document name
  {1} = parent directory
  {2} = Documents (default directory)
  {3} = Resources (default directory)
  {4} = Environment name
  {5} = Environments (default directory)
  {6} = CHILIData (default directory)
  Text marked in Bold is not variable. 
  Patterns number increase/decrease depending on the amount of subfolders used. 

• Step pages 

  Step places multiple pages from the same document onto a single page.
  With the settings provided a table is created where each cell holds the following page of the document.

• Spreads [outputs the pages as spreads]

• Include non-printing layers

• Include Bleed - outputs the bleed area in the PDF

  • Use values from document use the values for bleed specified in the document

  • Include bleedmarks outputs the hairlines to show where the bleed end

  • Include cropmarks ?outputs the hairlines to show the trim size of the page

• Include slug Outputs the slug area

• Fast web view

• Embed fonts Includes the fonts in the PDF document

• Create PDF Layers Create the layers you used in the document in the PDF

• Include annotations

• Include links

• Include bookmarks

PDF Info

This part contains meta-data to be written in the PDF document
You can have some information about the document filled in automatically with the use of pattens.

Open

Standards

This part allows you to specify which pdf standard/version to use when creating a pdf file.

• PDF version: pdf version 1.4 to 1.7

• Output PDF standard: PDF/X-4 or PDF/VT-1

When the PDF/VT-1 standard was selected following parameters are available:

• Output intent: specify the ICC profile you want to use as output intent. 
  
  

  • ContentIdentifier and RegistryName: these are ICC profile specific and need to be specified

• Debug VT content: adds additional information to the created files for debugging purposes

• VT Metadata: PDF/VT introduces the concept of document part metadata (DPM) to support, optimized efficient processing for repeating text, graphic or image content. This part will allow you to configure the metadata added to the file or record.

  • Use these to create, delete or move the metadata 
    
    

  • Name:   the name of the node

  • Save to: determines where to save the metadata of that specific node (root, record or root & record)

  • Target Key Loc: Root\Child\Child (f.e. Sender\Address\)

  • Source: 3 possibilities:
    
    

    • fixed string: a text string 

    • variable: a variable inside the document

    • datasource: a column of a datasource (=field of a record)

  • Value: specify the value for the source (string, name of variable, name of datasource column). This is added as the last value after the target location.
    (f.e. fixed string "City", this will be added after the target location to result in Sender\Address\City, another node could than be Country to result in Sender\Address\Country)

Open

Images

Settings about the quality of the included images:

With the image conversion profile you can specify an icc profile that will be used for the conversion of the image.

Optimization uses Ghostscript functionality to re-render the images in the document according to the parameters you specify here.
For example reducing the resolution of images above 250 dpi to 250dpi.

Security

Settings related to the security of the document.

Watermark Places a watermark in the document.

• When adding text watermarks to your document, it's important to use only characters within the range of U+0021 to U+007D. Using characters outside of this range can result in unexpected or incorrect watermarks. Therefore, it's recommended to use only A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and a few special characters such as !, @, #, $, and %. For further details on the available characters, refer UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding tables.

Owner password Required to change the document

User password Required to view / print the document

Allow content extraction When set, the user can extract text / images from the document

Allow modifications When set, the user can modify the document

Allow printing when set, the user can print the document

Datasource

In this tab, settings for the creation of pdf for documents that use variable data are set.

Create Datasource Output creates variable data content

Engine specifies how the creation of the data will be done:

• Legacy server rendering (Flash) : an air application executing the flash editor code

• HTML server rendering: a C# application executing the same logic as the HTML editor.

The engine can only be chosen for Version 1.0 of the PDF Generation Engine. The legacy editor_CLI is discontinued in Version 2.0. 

Max rows sets the maximum amount of records that will output. Records above this amount are not outputted.

Rows / PDF defines the amount of records per output pdf. 

Unspecified content assigns objects that are not assigned to either the variable or the background content.

Create separate background pdf creates a separate pdf file with all the objects that are tagged as background,. The variable content pdf's will be created separately

Include background layer in variable PDF files defines if the non-variable elements are included in the variable PDF. This setting is ignored if "Create separate background PDF" is false.

Minimum Success rate

In a perfect world, a variable data output batch job, will generate all records in the resulting PDF. However, it happens that a record contains invalid information / characters or other issues. For these cases, we introduced the “Minimum success rate” setting. This allows administrators to set a threshold for the percentage of records that must process successfully for the PDF output to generate:

• 100% = all records must be successful - PDF generation is aborted after the first failed record and no PDF is returned (default behavior).

• 75% = 75% of records must be successful - PDF generation is aborted if more than 25% of the records fail to process and no PDF is returned.

• 0% = all records are processed - PDF generation is not aborted when a record fails and a PDF is returned for any successful record.

In the event a failed record is encountered, a report XML file is generated and included in the output ZIP file. This report contains an overview of the failed records and the reason for failure.

Preflight

Guides

Embed Fonts and Font Subset

Embed Fonts

The Customer is fully responsible to embed and/or subset the font in conformity with the font license terms.

New PDF Export Settings will have "Embed Fonts" disabled by default. To enable font embedding the administrator needs to confirm the following disclaimer.

Existing PDF Export Settings will still embed fonts if this was enabled before.

Font Subset

A new option is now available when defining PDF Export Settings that allows a subset of fonts to be embedded in the PDF output. Using this option, only the characters that are present in the final output file will be included. This is especially beneficial for fonts that include many characters, glyphs, or support multiple languages. By only including a subset of characters, PDF file sizes will be reduced, increasing transfer speeds and making workflows more efficient.

An administrator can set the option in the PDF Export Settings as follows:

• Do not embed fonts

• Embed fonts and the complete character set

• Embed fonts using a subset of characters

NOTE: Because of the significant impact on file size, this option is enabled by default.