www.nickhodge.com

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

Adobe InDes­ign 2.0 has a fea­ture per­mit­ting dir­ect export of Adobe PDF. There have been some design­ers who have been con­fused about which ver­sion of PDF to send, and why their printers/receivers can­not out­put a qual­ity res­ult. The idea of this note is to cla­rify some of the work­flow points, and ensure high qual­ity output.

Rather than cre­at­ing (or print­ing) to Post­script and using the Acrobat Dis­til­ler to make a PDF, the dir­ect export of PDF uses a piece of tech­no­logy called the PDFLib­rary to con­struct the PDF.

This PDF is no lesser PDF than one cre­ated by the Postscript>Distiller method. The dif­fer­ences are noted here: InDes­ign 2.0: Export or Dis­till PDFs?

In InDes­ign 2.0, there are two major revi­sions of PDF you can export: Acrobat 4.0 (equal to PDF 1.3) and Acrobat 5.0 (equal to PDF 1.4). With each release of Acrobat, Adobe has been adding fea­tures to the file format. These fea­tures are exploited by InDes­ign when dir­ect export­ing. The graph­ics oper­at­ors used in applic­a­tions such as QuarkX­press and InDes­ign 1.5 are simple, and can be expressed in PDF 1.3.

View­ing these PDF 1.4 files inside the latest Reader you should not notice any major dif­fer­ences. Inside, how­ever, there is a whole world of dif­fer­ence that dic­tate how you should out­put the files.

Please note: not all Acrobat 5.0/PDF 1.4 files you receive will have trans­par­ency. With Dis­til­ler 5 or 6, using a Print to Post­script and Dis­till work­flow, it is pos­sible to cre­ate a PDF1.4 that does not con­tain trans­par­ency. To check for trans­par­ency, run the PDF through Pit­stop or Acrobat 6.0’s Pre­flight­ing tools.

When export­ing as an Acrobat 4.0/PDF 1.3, all of the trans­par­ency inside the InDes­ign file is flattened using the Trans­par­ency Flattener. This PDF is open­able in Acrobat 4.05 or later, and will print/RIP on any Post­script Level 2 or later device.

Export­ing as an Acrobat 5.0/PDF 1.4 res­ults in a very dif­fer­ent PDF. The trans­par­ency remains unflattened. This relies on another pro­cess flat­ten­ing the transparency.

How can you tell?

Open the PDF in Acrobat, and go to File>Document>Document Sum­mary

In the above screen dump there are three key pieces of information:

• Applic­a­tion is InDes­ign 2.0.x. High like­li­hood of trans­par­ency. Also look for Illus­trator 9.0.x or 10.0.x
• PDF Pro­du­cer is Adobe PDF Lib­rary 5.0, indic­at­ing a dir­ect export of PDF. High like­li­hood of transparency/
• PDF ver­sion is 1.4, also an indic­ator of trans­par­ency will be con­tained in the PDF.

How do you pro­duce a qual­ity print result?

Option 1:

Place PDF into InDes­ign 2.0, and print to Post­script. This will use InDesign’s Trans­par­ency Flattener to cre­ate a Post­script Level 2/3 file.

Pla­cing multiple-page PDFs into InDes­ign 2.0 can be time con­sum­ing. There are two scripts here that may assist: PDF mul­tipage import
(Win), PDF mul­tipage import (MacOS X) and PDF mul­tipage import (MacOS)

From InDes­ign 2.0, print the doc­u­ment con­tain­ing the PDFs to your out­put device. You can also use this method to Print to Post­script and re-Distill the PDF, or using InDes­ign 2.0: Print­ing Out­put Choices and Flattener Tricks (includ­ing force Grey­scale export!), change the col­our space at out­put time.

Option 2:

Print from Acrobat 6.0. Why not 5.0? The Trans­par­ency Flattener in Acrobat 5.0 and Illus­trator 9.0 is “an older gen­er­a­tion” — and may not pro­duce the same qual­ity res­ult as InDes­ign 2.0.

The above illus­trates what appears under the Advanced but­ton in Acrobat 6.0’s Print… dia­log box. Here, you can set the Trans­par­ency Flattener set­tings in a sim­ilar way to InDes­ign 2.0.

More inform­a­tion about Acrobat 6.0 is here: Acrobat 6.0 Pro­fes­sional: Graph­ics, Print, Prepress Overview

Option 3:

RIP the PDF on a device that truly sup­ports PDF 1.4. Devices such as Creo Prinergy 2.1 sup­port PDF 1.4 files and flat­ten the InDes­ign cre­ated trans­par­ency as a part of the nor­m­al­isa­tion pro­cess. Other RIPs such as the Fuji­film Cel­eb­rant Extreme RIP sup­port PDF 1.4 in a sim­ilar way.

Some device man­u­fac­tur­ers claim they sup­port Acrobat 5.0/PDF 1.4 files. This may be the case, but the key ques­tion is “does it flat­ten trans­par­ency in the RIP?” Some devices will dis­card the trans­par­ency, res­ult­ing in a print job that is vastly dif­fer­ent to the InDes­ign file.

What Not to Do:

Many cus­tom­ers email me ask­ing about pla­cing InDes­ign EPS files into QuarkX­press 4.x or 5 , and using tools like Impos­i­tion (an Xpress plu­gin) to impose InDes­ign jobs. There are many reas­ons why this is an out­dated work­flow. Ignor­ing InDes­ign for a moment, what hap­pens when you receive a QuarkX­press 6.0 file? Life is going to get dif­fi­cult very quickly. Time to move to true PDF based impos­i­tion envir­on­ment. Squeez­ing all the PDFs you receive back through QuarkX­press is just ask­ing for trouble.

• Do Not Open in Acrobat 5.0, save as EPS and place into QuarkX­press, any ver­sion. This is largely the same as Print­ing as Post­script from Acrobat 5.0.
• Do Not Place the PDF into QuarkX­press as a PDF. QuarkXpress’s engine for open­ing and pla­cing PDFs only works with Acrobat 3.0/PDF 1.2 files, noth­ing later. For instance, spot col­ours that may be in the PDF are not recognised.
• Do Not Open the PDF in Illus­trator, any ver­sion, and attempt to print. Illus­trator is not a uni­ver­sal PDF edit­ing application.
• Do Not Place the PDF in InDes­ign 1.5. This ver­sion of InDes­ign does not have a trans­par­ency flattener, and there­fore a qual­ity res­ult can­not be obtained.
• Do Not Open and con­vert the PDF in Pho­toshop, any ver­sion. Pho­toshop will ras­ter­ise the PDF into pixels. Even at 300dpi, this will res­ult in a very large file and any vec­tor graph­ics and text will “go fuzzy” at print time as it is passed through a halftone screen at the RIP-end.

If you are send­ing dir­ectly expor­ted Acrobat 5.0 PDFs from InDes­ign 2.0, send this web page to your printer.

Thanks to Mar­cus for ensur­ing I got off my bum and wrote this article.