Rasterlink sees white instead of PDFs...

[WI]

Very infrequently, I'll feed a PDF into Rasterlink(v5) and instead of RIPing the PDF normally, I'll get a blank white image. The dimensions are correct, there's just nothing but whitespace where the image is supposed to be.

I've had this happen on two different computers that are hooked up to two different printers, both running the same version of Rasterlink.

All of the PDFs I've used (both the ones that worked and the ones that didn't) have been saved under the "Illustrator Default" setting of Illustrator CS5.5.

Now the kludge for this job that I'm dealing with right now is to just dump the PDF into Photoshop, save a TIFF and print that, but I'd really like to know why this happens in case it decides to get difficult with something I can't just hammer down with Photoshop.

Anyone ever dealt with this problem?

 

[MikePro]

i get "white .pdf's" when the artwork is outside of the artboard.
can't just resave the file as an .eps?

 

[WI]

This file does have stuff outside of the artboard, but I've run lots of artwork with objects scattered outside of the artboard and that's never been an issue, so I'm not sure if that's the trigger, though it might be related somehow.

As for the EPS solution, more than half of this job has already been run as PDFs. I dropped an EPS file into the hopper, and wouldn't you know it? RIPed a slightly different color. I ultimately hacked a new file together from one of the old ones that processed correctly, but I would still really love to know why the $**** this happens...