microsoft, munging and on being a mercurial iconoclastic professional geek.

• Home
• About
• General Melchett
• LOLs-n-Stuff
• Photos
• Shared News Items

Find Stuff

Meta

• Register
• Log in
• WordPress

About Me

Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

MrCell+61.417.212181

Work:

1 Epping Road

North Ryde, NSW 2113

Australia

Stuff

• AU Web Thinkers

  • Des Walsh
  • Duncan Riley
  • Jo White
  • Kate Carruthers
  • Laurel Papworth
  • Mark Pesce
  • Mick Liubinskas
  • Nic Hac
  • Stephen Collins
  • Steve Noble
  • Stilgherrian

• Ego Links

  • basketweaving for the mind
  • Last.fm Music List
  • Live Spaces sand-pit
  • My blip.tv Videos
  • My Youtubes
  • Nick’s Flickr Photos
  • RSS: Nick Hodge: The Complete Feed
  • Slides Shared to the World
  • The Geek Stories; on10.net
  • Twitter
  • Viddler videos

• Friends

  • Mark Szulc
  • Nick Hodge, Excel MVP

• Geek Gods

  • Gary Barber
  • Jed White
  • Lachlan Hardy
  • Myles Eftos
  • Paul Stovell
  • Tatham Oddie
  • Tim Lucas

• Microsoft Peeps

  • Andrew Coates
  • Andrew Parsons
  • Catherine Eibner
  • Frank Arrigo
  • Jeff Alexander
  • Jorke Odolphi
  • Michael Kordahi
  • Nic Fillingham
  • Paul Foster
  • Roger Lawrence
  • Shane Morris

PDF, Trapping and Overprint">QuarkXpress, PDF, Trapping and Overprint

By Nick Hodge | November 30, 2001

Over­print­ing & Trap­ping in Adobe PDF Quick Note

ver­sion 1.2

As Acrobat 5.0 has this new cool “Over­print Pre­view” fea­ture. And as Barney Kassa­bian has promp­ted me, this raises the whole issue of QuarkX­press and overprints/trapping.

Over the last 2 years, I was under the impres­sion that over­prints were retained in com­pos­ite Quark Post­script files. I was only partly cor­rect, or a bit wrong. You choose. To cla­rify, I have been experimenting.

Over­print­ing in QuarkX­press 3.32 to Adobe PDF

If you save out of QuarkX­press 3.32 as an EPS, Quark keeps the over­print­ing set­tings (as set in the View>Trap Inform­a­tion palette). Dis­tilling this with Acrobat Dis­til­ler 4.05 or 5 res­ults in a PDF where the over­print is retained. New in Acrobat 5.0 — you can view this on screen.

How­ever, if you use the Adobe pre­ferred method of “Print­ing” via AdobePS to the Dis­til­ler (Mac: Cre­ate Adobe PDF, PC: Acrobat Dis­til­ler print­ers) — the over­print­ing inform­a­tion is NOT retained in the Postscript.

If you are a Post­script jockey, you can see the simple com­mand is just plain miss­ing from the Prin­ted .ps file:

“T stovp’ — set over­print on the next drawn object to true — in Eng­lish. This par­tic­u­lar com­mand (stovp) is defined in both the EPS and the stand­ard Post­script head­ers of a QuarkX­press 3.32 Post­script file; its a QuarkX­press spe­cific com­mand in their Post­script header. Its just that the Com­pos­ite Post­script prin­ted from Quark hap­pens to be miss­ing the appro­pri­ate over­print command.

If you are wise to the ways of Post­script, or will­ing to shoot off your own foot, you can insert this com­mand into the Prin­ted post­script file from the the EPS ver­sion and viola! you have over­print­ing in the Prin­ted out­put. Be warned! This may res­ult in a Post­script file that is no longer valid; it may not RIP; and the Dis­til­ler may ‘spit its cook­ies’ at you. You have been warned. Don’t try this at home. I am a trained pro­fes­sional. Your mileage may vary. Insert stand­ard legal dis­claimer here.

The good news in this is that over­print inform­a­tion IS LEFT in the EPS files; placed from Illus­trator or Quark gen­er­ated EPS.

So, what is the recom­men­ded work­flow? Out of QuarkX­press 3.32, save each page as an EPS file. Place each of these EPS files BACK into a QuarkX­press doc­u­ment (or InDes­ign doc­u­ment ) and THEN fol­low the guidelines of Print­ing to the Dis­til­ler via AdobePS.

Please note: you should not nest EPS file inside EPS files inside EPS files. Why not? Each EPS saves a graphic state before sraw­ing its con­tents; at least once. There is a limit of 15 of these in Post­script 3; and depend­ing on the con­tent in the EPS, the RIP may cause a ‘lim­itcheck’ Post­script error.

Also please note: When cre­at­ing and Dis­tilling EPS files from QuarkX­press, note that Quark does not embed the fonts. This restric­tion forces you to Dis­till on the cre­at­ing machine. Oth­er­wise, there is the risk that you cre­ate a PDF where the fonts are not embedded.

And the res­ult­ing PDF dis­played in Acrobat 5.0 with Over­print Pre­view turned on:

Another method, albeit more prone to trouble, is tak­ing the EPS files cre­ated above and Dis­tilling these dir­ectly. The trouble that you might find in this method is that the Dis­til­lers “Default Page Size” is used, UNLESS you have “Res­ize Page and Cen­ter Art­work for EPS Files” checked in the Advan­ved Tab.

Evid­endly, Quark’s Com­pos­ite post­script out­put changed in QuarkX­press 4.0x — where the over­print­ing set­tings were retained. This is good news.

Trap­ping

In a slightly sim­ilar fash­ion, QuarkX­press only saves its choking/spreading inform­a­tion when it prints Sep­ar­a­tions (usu­ally not the default PDF work­flow) or if you export as a DCS file. Once you save as a DCS file, you have sep­ar­ated your work. The choking/spreading is not saved when you save as EPS.

How do you “recom­pose” the sep­ar­ated DCS file/separated QuarkX­press file into a com­pos­ite PDF? Apart from using a Mod­ern Prepress applic­a­tion like InDes­ign? Adobe InDes­ign: Prepress Techniques

Thank­fully, CreoSci­tex have an Acrobat plu­gin called CreoSci­tex Seps2Comp You can down­load a trial ver­sion Win­dows and/or MacOS from their web site.

It takes a mul­tiple page PDF and allows you to “recom­bine” them into a com­pos­ite PDF. In the­ory, com­mon ele­ments will exist in exactly the same place across the dif­fer­ent plates. Its a mat­ter of then adding the images/graphics back together and gen­er­at­ing a com­pos­ite image on screen. To do this manu­ally involves cre­at­ing chan­nels in a Pho­toshop file (one chan­nel for each of C, M, Y and K) — but you are left with a purely bit­map image.

Here is a screen dump of Sep2Comp in action. Its just a simple mat­ter of apply­ing a cer­tain ink to the page that con­tains that plate. In Pre-separated Post­script, there is a spe­cial com­mand that details how the sep­ar­a­tion is com­posed; Seps2Comp reads this and auto­mat­ic­ally applies the appro­pri­ate plate to ink.

And the final result

Also good news is that Page­Maker 6.x and InDes­ign 1.x saves com­pos­ite Post­script with Trap­ping & Over­print­ing by default. There is no need for all this jump­ling through hoops and funny business.

This is a screen dump of Acrobat 5.0 show­ing the effect of trap­ping using the default set­tings. As many of these traps have been set to over­print — you can see the traps live on screen. Cool.

InDes­ign 2.0: Gen­er­at­ing Com­pos­ite, Trapped PDFs has more info on how to do with with InDes­ign 2.0.

Adobe’s Sup­port site on Trapping:

Trap­ping in InDes­ign 1.x

Trap­ping in Page­Maker 6x

Quark’s Sup­port site has good over­views of Trap­ping and Overprinting:

Trap­ping Over­view from Quark

Thanks to Shane Stan­ley for sug­gest­ing the nes­ted EPS change; Barney Kassa­bian for prompt­ing this research & sup­ply­ing test files; Grant Git­tus for run­ning his exper­i­enced eyes over my comments.

Topics: mungenet | 1 Comment »