InDesign 2.0: Trapping Journey with Prinergy

By Nick Hodge | October 22, 2002

[1546] InDesign CS Logo Visit the new InDesign Prepress Section: Adobe InDesign: Prepress Techniques

Comments on Creo Prinergy and InDesign 2.0

In Australia, the most common RIP I see in highend platemaking work is the Creo Prinergy series

This particular system takes in Postscript and PDF, and foes through a process of Normalising the input into PDF. As a part of this process, it can preflight and check the incoming stream to ensure a quality printed result.

Prinergy takes natively exported InDesign 2.0 PDFs sucessfully, and the 2.1 version of Prinergy permits in-RIP transparency flattening (not discarding like some competitors!).

However, there are two options in the Refining stage that can create issues for InDesign created jobs. These issues are to do with Prinergy correcting common issues with QuarkXpress generated Composite Postscript (and therefore PDF)

They can be found in the Refine Process Plan section of Prinergy, and specifically inside Color Convert, Overprint Conversion

Set Colours to Knockout

Setting process colours to knockout globally is dangerous. It overrides the overprint setting in the input file and forces the colurs to knockout. As a result, colour printing order affects which separations knocks out.

You would use this feature for disabling overprint and enabling content colour matching for all objects in a PDF page. When you select this feature, you also let the printed PDF page match the onscreen PDF page only when Overprint Preview is turned off.

Therefore, you are creating a printed result which only matches the onscreen view in Acrobat 4.0 or the Reader. Not InDesign 2.0 or Acrobat 5.0 with Overprint Preview turned on, or more importantly, as the RIP that you created proofs from probably proofed the job!

As I understand it, this is turned on in Prinergy to "clean up bad Postscript" eminating from QuarkXpress in Composite style workflows. I am willing to hear other issues it solves.

One of the very significant impacts of this is in CMYK+Spot colour PDF workflows with PDF 1.3 files. (ref: InDesign 2.0: Spot Colors, Transparency) InDesign's flattener creates white process-only-knockout boxes where a spot colour needs to print. You may notice these boxes when viewing the PDF in the Reader or Acrobat without Overprint Preview. When this option is turned on, the spot plates will be knocked out by these boxes, and the resulting plates are not printable.

Another impact is with Composite, Trapped PDFs. ((ref: InDesign 2.0: Generating Composite, Trapped PDFs)
The trapping created by the referred technique are discarded when this option is turned on.
Set Black to Overprint

All Black elements (where the ink settings are 100%K, 0 CMY) are converted into overprinted black.