Microsoft Publisher is Microsoft’s effort at developing a more commercial and professional program designed for prepress and printing. Print shops and service bureaus shied away from Publisher in earlier versions for lack of essential tools such as adding printer’s marks, color separation tools, and changing halftone frequency.

However, Microsoft continued development of the product and the latest version of Publisher includes all the features needed for prepress and commercial printing. When it comes to exports to PDF, Adobe supports some of the much needed file attributes required to print files on press.

When you open the Acrobat PDFMaker from the Adobe PDF menu in Microsoft Publisher, the Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box displays some settings choices not found in any of the other Acrobat PDFMaker dialog boxes.

As shown in Figure above you have some unique settings that apply only to Microsoft Publisher. These settings include the following:

• Conversion Settings. The default Adobe PDF Setting is Press Quality. Like the other Acrobat PDFMaker dialog boxes, you can change the setting by clicking the Advanced Settings button.

• Preserve Spot Color in Adobe PDF. If spot colors are used in the Publisher file, you need to check this box to preserve the spot colors. If you fail to do so, spot colors are converted to CMYK.

• Print Crop Marks. As you can see by comparing this Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box with the others shown for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you see the first option for adding crop marks when a file is converted to PDF. This setting is very important if you have bleeds on pages in the Publisher document.

• Allow Bleeds. If bleeds are contained in the PowerPoint file, you must check the box to allow bleeds. When the box is checked, you have another setting to print separate bleed marks.

• Preserve Transparency in Adobe PDF. You can check the box to preserve transparency and let Acrobat flatten the transparency at print time.

The features added to the PowerPoint Acrobat PDFMaker are all related to commercial printing.