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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.

My recom­mend­a­tion is to be very, very care­ful with these options when work­ing with InDes­ign 2.0 cre­ated PDFs with Prinergy