From the course: Illustrator: Seeing Through Transparency

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Using the PDF/X standards

Using the PDF/X standards

As we discussed in the previous movie, PDF is basically a wrapper format, meaning that I can put anything inside of the PDF file and transmit it from one computer to another. Because of that, engineers like to refer to the PDF file format as a garbage in/garbage out format. It means that if you put garbage into your file, when you open up that PDF file, the only thing you have is garbage inside of it. In other words, whatever you put into it is what you are going to get out of it. Now this posed the problem for printers when PDF first started becoming popular because they would actually ask a design to supply them with a PDF file, but they had no way of knowing what settings the designer was using when they created the PDF file. Did they include the fonts in a PDF file? Did they use high-resolution images? Were any of images in the RGB color format? I mean there were so many of the different settings that were possible inside of a PDF file and then often those settings were incorrect…

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