Hi Geoff,
             Can't your printer handle something other than a 
pdf for the cover? Everyone's case is a little different but  in
photoshop I print to the pdf writer, choose the print settings then go
to advanced and choose the settings I want . Is that what you do? 

Will Smith
Project Officer (Botanical Imaging)
Environmental Sciences
Department of Environment and Resource Management Toowong Brisbane
Australia
Telephone (07) 38969508
-----Original Message-----
From: SciArt-L Discussion List-for Natural Science Illustration-
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Geoff Thompson
Sent: Thursday, 12 May 2011 7:54 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SCIART] Making a PDF

Wow! I didn't know that either. I tend to open in Microsoft picture
manager
and print a contact sheet from that. It has other options too but it
uses a
printer wizard and is a bit primitive. However did you then need to cut
out
all the thumbnails from the contact sheet from Bridge? If so wouldn't it
be
quicker to create an action and batch process thumbnails to a separate
file
in Photoshop?
I've been having my own problems with PDFs. I find changing the settings
in
Acrobat Pro a pain. I have a cover I have to make from Photoshop,
because I
am not au fait with Indesign and all I had to modify a complicated cover
design was a printer's PDF. It takes ages to lay out the contents text
in
Photoshop. I have asked that a designer be paid to design a new cover
that I
can more easily modify in Indesign, with a little training, because this
way
is too hard. We also don't do line drawings anymore and it's getting
harder
to find a black and white cover image each year. Colour printing now
costs
no more too. So a new design based on cover photographs is needed.
The current design has an edging with tone and silhouetted beetles. At
the
printer's request I expanded it by 3mm for trimming (this was a delicate
task). When I made a PDF of the first page in Photoshop it downsized it
in
some way. When I printed it to a PDF after modifying the printing
settings
it trimmed the 3mm off the edges. 
Most frustrating though was when I combined the front cover (generated
in
Photoshop) with the inside text (generated from a Word document) the
resultant file was downsized again!
Can anyone offer advice as to the different ways of modifying PDF
quality
settings in Adobe programs?
Thanks,
Geoff

-----Original Message-----
From: SciArt-L Discussion List-for Natural Science Illustration-
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Wendy Beth Jackelow
Sent: Thursday, 12 May 2011 1:25 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SCIART] Making a PDF

Thank you all for this discussion! I didn't even know it applied to me
until
yesterday when someone wanted
thumbnails of about 70 pieces of art. I had no idea that Bridge could
generate a contact sheet. I put all the art
in one big folder and then made 2 contact sheets--easy as pie! Thanks,
Bradley, for mentioning this aspect of Bridge.
I didn't even know it existed!

Take care,
Wendy

Wendy Beth Jackelow, MFA, CMI
Medical & Scientific Illustration

266 Pelton Avenue
Staten Island, NY 10310
Tel/fax (718) 273-0002
[log in to unmask]
http://www.wbjackelowstudios.com

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+----------------------------------------------------------------+
Think B4U Print
1 ream of paper = 6% of a tree and 5.4kg CO2 in the atmosphere
3 sheets of A4 paper = 1 litre of water
+----------------------------------------------------------------+

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