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Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / September 2006Embedded PDF loses some of its content?
I embed a one-page PDF vector image (lines, points, text) in a Eudora email by dragging it into the body of the message. Most of the image shows up just fine (before sending), except that a couple of major data points in the image are missing -- apparently just gone. (Don't know what would happen at the receiving end.) The graphic was created in Mathematica, exported in EPS format, opened and touched up in Illustrator, and saved as PDF from there (with the "Preserve the Illustrator editing capabilities" option checked). Looks fine viewed in Acrobat. Am I running into a layers problem? > Am I running into a layers problem? If it looks fine in Acrobat, why worry? To me it sounds that Eudora's shoddy rendering of content other than text or images is the culprit.  SignatureCheers Martin > > Am I running into a layers problem? > > If it looks fine in Acrobat, why worry? > To me it sounds that Eudora's shoddy rendering of content other than > text or images is the culprit. Well, I asked the original question (about a PDF graphic that mysteriously lost part of its content when embedded in an outgoing msg -- two important data points in the plot just disappeared, at least as seen by me, the sender) for several reasons: 1) This seems a pretty mysterious event -- something unexpected is happening. I'd like to understand what's happening. (I don't know, for example, if the same points would have been missing in the msg as viewed by the recipients -- in the msg body, or in the associated HD file on the recipient's desktop. Not wanting to take that risk, I converted the PDF to a jaggy JPEG and inserted that instead.) 2) Sometimes it's convenient to append a PDF file (maybe a multi-page document) to an outgoing msg as an attachment (which means the recipient has to open it separately). Sometimes it's more convenient to drag a PDF file (maybe just one page) into the msg body, so the recipient can see it (on some mail clients, anyway) right there in the msg body, while reading the msg, without opening anything. If the latter approach has weaknesses, I'd like to know about them. 3) Seems to me in the current world, PDF files *are* images. I used to save graphics originals as PostScript, EPS, JPEG, or TIFF files and make PDF copies of them for presentation and sharing. But Adobe says, "PDF is the native format of Illustrator". PDF files can be opened by, edited in, and saved from Illustrator and Photoshop. iView MediaPro now catalogs PDF files just fine. So, single-page PDFs *are* in effect images, and I now keep most of my master originals as PDFs only. So, this glitch seems significant, and if a high-quality program like Eudora isn't handling them well, we should know about it. > Sometimes it's more convenient to drag a > PDF file (maybe just one page) into the msg body, so the recipient can > see it (on some mail clients, anyway) right there in the msg body, while > reading the msg, without opening anything. Some mail clients are better than others at rendering inline content, some don't do it at all like Mailsmith if I remember correctly. In Eudora you can turn off rendering for the message body. All of this is beyond your control. > 3) Seems to me in the current world, PDF files *are* images. PDFs are containers for all kinds of information, not just images. They can contain bitmap images, live-text, vectors and as far as I know multimedia content. > So, this glitch seems significant, and if a high-quality program like > Eudora isn't handling them well, we should know about it. Eudora does a poor job at displaying Quicktime movies, too: sometimes the first frame appears blank or the controller is missing until you click it. This should all change dramatically for the better in the upcoming E7 as that will be using the system's KHTML kit for display. But the point is moot since what you see at your end won't necessarily be what the recipient sees. > > 3) Seems to me in the current world, PDF files *are* images. > > PDFs are containers for all kinds of information, not just images. They > can contain bitmap images, live-text, vectors and as far as I know > multimedia content. Absolutely true, no argument with this. But I think my point is valid also: a single-page PDF containing only a single bitmap image, or a single vector graphic (plus maybe a modest amount of added text), *is* for most practical purposes an "image", which can be stored, archived, edited, cataloged, slide-projected, and so on. Given these characteristics, there are very few cases where I keep an EPS or PostScript version of a vector graphic around as a "master" or "archive" copy; its created as, converted to, or retained as a PDF copy only, and edited in Illustrator if and when editing is needed. I'm less confident about doing this with bitmap or raster graphics. I'd like to have a better understanding of how much of the underlying info is retained and how much lost when I convert a JPEG image into a PDF, and also how much is lost or left behind if I extract it back out??? > I'd > like to have a better understanding of how much of the underlying info > is retained and how much lost when I convert a JPEG image into a PDF, > and also how much is lost or left behind if I extract it back out??? Saving an image from Photoshop as a PDF gives you options to compress using LZW or JPEG, but apart from that I would assume that all it does is wrapping the image in a PDF container. I often combine several images into a multi-page PDF using Acrobat. The interesting thing is that when adding them via the 'insert page' command they will all be added and Acrobat doesn't prompt you for compression settings at all. The size of the resulting PDF is pretty much the sum of all the single images' sizes, so I can only conclude that this leaves the images untouched, which is a great way of archiving. Going the opposite route using the 'extract images' command, Acrobat will not re-compress already compressed images. However I've noticed that it sometimes seems to have difficulties determining the native resolution of the images and you end up with a resampled (usually bigger) image. In Photoshop you have no choice but to specify the resolution yourself when opening a PDF, so it's likely hit and miss. > So, this glitch seems significant, and if a high-quality program like > Eudora isn't handling them well, we should know about it. Receiving pdfs works fine; I regularly get them sent via Eudora, many of them inline; in 6.1.1 and OS10.3.9 they display pretty well. Double clicking on the message display opens the pdf in Acrobat Reader, and then of course the pdfs are displayed as well as they could possibly be. But the best and safest way to make sure that pdfs sent by you are received exactly as they should be is to attach them in the usual way, by dragging and dropping them onto the 'attachments' line in the header space and encoding with AppleDouble. Any mail client capable of handling pdf attachments will then get the full benefit. SignaturePeter [newsgroups trimmed] > Well, I asked the original question (about a PDF graphic that > mysteriously lost part of its content when embedded in an outgoing msg [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > associated HD file on the recipient's desktop. Not wanting to take that > risk, I converted the PDF to a jaggy JPEG and inserted that instead.) Since you don't actually know what is happening, test to find out. Send the message to yourself, with the graphic imbedded as before. Once you've received the message, open it in Illustrator. Until you've done that, you can't know whether there is a problem with the attached file or just a problem with Eudora's display of it. SignatureKathy - If you're reading this in your web browser from Google or similar forum, NNTP "newsreaders" are a better way to access the content. <http://www.aptalaska.net/~kmorgan/how-it-works.html> Links to NNTP newsreaders at <http://www.newsreaders.com/> > To me it sounds that Eudora's shoddy rendering of content other than > text or images is the culprit. As a followup to this thread, I dragged a one-page 11 X 8.5 inch (landscape mode) all-vector-content PDF into the body of an outgoing message, and it went in as a _long_ page (at least letter-sized, maybe even longer) with the actual slide content way down at the bottom of the window and a lot of blank space above it, that turned orange when clicked (you had to scroll way down to see the content). When I emailed this message to myself, the received message had the same properties. When I dragged the image out of the received message and onto my desktop, it went back into its original proportions and seemed just fine. When I opened that returned image in Illustrator, it's artboard was again 11 W X 8.5 H (landscape mode). Given what a fine program Eudora is otherwise, let's not call Eudora's handling of this "shoddy" -- but "imperfect" would seem to be called for. Any way to pass this observation on to Eudora? > Given what a fine program Eudora is otherwise, let's not call Eudora's > handling of this "shoddy" -- but "imperfect" would seem to be called for. Agreed. > Any way to pass this observation on to Eudora? In Eudora select 'Help' -> 'Make a suggestion' or 'Report a bug'. However as i mentioned before, the next version of Eudora is said to use the KHTML engine for rendering which should give you the same, much improved display that Apple Mail users are enjoying already. SignatureCheers Martin |
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