Errors
Here are some explanations of common error messages you might get, and how you can potentially work around them. Also, if there’s a feature that has been working that stops working after you update to a new version, the workaround is temporarily returning to a previous app version.
Cloud files
If you try to open a PDF that is “online only” on the cloud (eg Dropbox, Google Cloud, etc), you’ll get a little error message, since it’s not actually saved on your computer yet.
You’ll need to get the file fully onto your computer before Layout Department can use it. The easiest way to do that on a Mac is: go to Finder, double click on the file (this will download it, and also open it in Preview). Then just pop that file back into Layout Department again, and you’ll be good to go.
We couldn’t understand that pdf file
If you see this error, something may be wrong with your file — please check that your pdf can be opened in Preview (on Mac) or another PDF viewer.
If you can open the PDF and see the content in a PDF viewer, but Layout Department gives you an error, please get in touch via email at contact@layoutdepartment.com — we’d like to fix this bug.
PDFs with Crop
Layout Department does not officially support PDFs that have crop boxes defined. If the PDFs you are working with do have crop boxes, please check the results with care.
Crop boxes are where content is included outside of the bounds of the page – beyond the trim and bleed - which is hidden when you look at the PDF in most PDF viewers. This is unusual, most design applications wouldn’t make crop boxes without you doing it on purpose. More technical information on them can be found here.
We recommend creating PDFs without crop boxes. However, we know that sometimes you might be working with files you didn’t create yourself, and those might include crop boxes: Layout Department will try to do the best it can to handle these, but the results may not always be what you expect. Do some extra checking on the results to make sure the pages are in the scale, position, and rotation you expect; and edit the PDF to remove crop boxes if necessary.
PDFs with Multiple Page Sizes
Layout Department does not officially support PDFs that have multiple page sizes – meaning that the individual pages of your PDF have different dimensions.
We recommend making your PDF’s pages all have the same dimensions.
But, we know sometimes you might have a PDF with page sizes that are a little different, so Layout Department will try to do the best it can for you – and it might work out ok (or maybe not). So just give an extra-good look at your imposed PDF and make sure it’s what you’re expecting.
Some examples:
- If the page sizes are only a few millimeters different from one another, it’s often fine, but if you have pages that are really different in size (for example, a PDF where page 1 is A5 size, page 2 is A4 size) then things can get weird.
- If you have a PDF where the Cover is included as a spread, and then the rest of the PDF is the interior pages individually, we recommend deleting the cover page from your PDF and laying out only the interior. Then, you can use use Cover to lay it out the cover separately. Or you you could make the pages of your cover into single pages in your design program sand include them with the interior pages. (You’ll want to put the back cover as the last page of the PDF, in this case.)
- If some of the pages are individual pages and some are spreads (the left and right hand side pages of the book combined into a single “page” of the PDF) that can also do strange things – instead, split your spreads so that you’re working with a PDF made up of only single pages.
- If you try resizing the document’s pages on a PDF where the pages are different sizes, things can get weird.
Slow Image Rendering
If you get a warning about slow image rendering, just hang tight… your PDF has some sort of images embedded in an unusual way (often it’s .jpx, .jp2, or .tiff types that are the culprit) and that makes it take some extra time to load in the UI. Everything will work fine for making layouts, it’ll just be in slo-mo when it re-renders. Ah, computers! We love them, but they are silly sometimes.