Acrobat TrimBoxes and ArtBoxes errors?

Question

Someone in our family is getting into the publishing business, and the printers have very exact specifications for the PDF files they accept. I'm hoping for some help figuring out what is wrong with my file.

The printer instructs us to submit "PDF/X-1a:2001" format. When trying to print our 170-page color MS Publisher files to PDF (we have bona fide Acrobat X), PDF creation fails:

<PDFX ISO="15930-1:2001" COMPLIANT="false">

PDF/X Compliance Report

1.  Bounding Boxes

   [Violation] Both TrimBoxes and ArtBoxes were found on the following pages:
      Page 1, Occurrences: 1
      Page 2, Occurrences: 1
      ... (170 pages) ...
   Violations: The total found in this section was 170.

2.  Summary

   Warnings: The total found in this document was 0.
   Violations: The total found in this document was 170.

   This document does not pass PDF/X-1a:2001 compliance checks.

</PDFX>

%%[ Warning: Did not pass PDF/X compliance tests. No PDF file produced. ] %%

Can someone suggest what we might be doing wrong in Publisher to get this error? Are there any other software that can produce "PDF/X-1a:2001" PDFs - and do a better job, uh, "making it work"?

This seems to be a very common problem, but nobody on the internet has a solution. Thoughts?

Answer 1

Create a non-PDF/X file first.

You could now start Acrobat's preflight tool. Then find the "single fixup" to remove the ArtBox entries for each PDF page.

After that, run it again through a re-distilling process in Acrobat Pro in order to finally create your desired PDF/X-1a:2001.

Background info: using ArtBox is deprecated in general and forbidden in PDF/X-1a:2001.