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

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InDesign 2.0: Export or Distill PDFs?

By Nick Hodge | October 22, 2002

Visit the new InDes­ign Prepress Sec­tion: Adobe InDes­ign: Prepress Tech­niques

InDes­ign: Use the Dis­til­ler or Export PDFs?

This was ori­gin­ally pos­ted to the InDesign-Blueworld mail­ing list on 14-October-2002

Firstly, there is noth­ing tech­nic­ally wrong with Expor­ted PDFs from InDes­ign. At all. I (per­son­ally) have had great suc­cess with expor­ted PDFs from InDes­ign RIP­ping to Prinergy and vari­ous other imagesetters/platesetters in pro­duc­tion in the field.

When you send, or you have received an Acrobat 5.0/PDF 1.4 — dir­ectly expor­ted from InDes­ign 2.0, the work­flow choices are a little dif­fer­ent: Print­ing Acrobat 5.0/PDF1.4 Gen­er­ated by Adobe InDes­ign 2.0

In either work­flow, you will get a high qual­ity PDF that will gen­er­ate great output.

How­ever, I do recom­mend using a Print to Postscript-Distill work­flow in the fol­low­ing situations:

1. When you are send­ing a PDF “blind”.
   

   In other words, where you are not sure of the provenance/age/version/vendor of your printer’s RIP — they will more than likely have determ­ined an internal work­flow for Distiller-made PDFs. They will have .job­op­tions avail­able for your use, and have tested Dis­til­ler made PDFs from QuarkX­press, InDes­ign and other sources. If they use tools like Pit­stop, they prob­ably have cre­ated pre­flight checks based on Distiller-made PDFs.
   

   This is espe­cially the case if you are send­ing advert­ise­ments, send­ing files to remote coun­tries or doing work for a cli­ent where your cli­ent nom­in­ates a printer and it is not your choice. In these style work­flows, there is a blind handoff.
   

   There­fore, Cre­at­ing Post­script and Dis­tilling is the safest path.
   
   

2. Your Printer’s RIPs are Har­le­quin < 5.3
   

   This is the CID font encod­ing issue. As you prob­ably know by now, InDes­ign to accur­ately rep­res­ent glyphs like lig­at­ures, InDes­ign encodes the text in its PDFs in a form known as “CID”.
   

   THERE IS NOTHING WRONG, TRICKY, HIDDEN OR EVIL about CID font encod­ing. It’s a valid part of the PDF spe­cific­a­tion that cer­tain vendors had not imple­men­ted in their soft­ware. By Print to Postscript-Distill, there is no CID font encod­ing, whereas expor­ted PDFs do. Well build (that is: to
   spe­cific­a­tion) RIPs/Imagesetters work suc­cess­fully with CID font encoding.
   

   A large InDes­ign cus­tomer here in Aus­tralia have a *very* old Har­le­quin RIP which is integ­ral in their work­flow. This forces the Distiller-route PDF gen­er­a­tion: which works flaw­lessly, day in and day out.
   

   Again, if you do not worry, under­stand or even care what your printer is
   using: the Dis­til­ler is a com­mon stand­ard method.
   
   

3. Your printer/publisher is con­ser­vat­ive, and provides a Distiller-workflow option.
   

   OK, so your printer accepts PDFs and provides a series of steps and a Dis­til­ler 4/5 .job­op­tions file. In this case, I some­times recom­mend people export a PDF from InDes­ign to see if it works suc­cess­fully (pre­pare to be sur­prised!) — how­ever, to make life easier and have less Prepress tech­nical people get­ting hot under the col­lar, use the Print to Postscript-Distill route.
   
   

All of this said, Export­ing PDFs is a bet­ter option. Why?

1. Its quicker. Much quicker.
2. There are less trans­la­tions (InDesign->Postscript->PDF, vs.
   InDesign->PDF)
3. Once there are more RIPs with InRIP flat­ten­ing (next revi­sion of Prinergy, Fuji­film etc) are out there, we get even faster out­put to Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4). A sight to behold, people!

There­fore, if you have the chance to test Expor­ted PDFs with your
work­flow, please do.

Please note that Aus­tralia is far, far along the High Qual­ity PDF path. PDF is the industry stand­ard here in Aus­tralia (inde­pend­ent study) with a major­ity of print­ers get­ting a major­ity of their work in as PDF. This involves a pleth­ora of RIPs, work­flow soft­ware, impos­i­tion tools etc. There­fore in Aus­tralia, Dis­til­ler is a con­sist­ent known entity, and why we prag­mat­ic­ally recom­mend Print to Dis­til­ler PDF gen­er­a­tion for our InDes­ign cus­tom­ers here.

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