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InDesign 2.0: How to Export and Place Pages back into InDesign 2.0

By Nick Hodge | July 9, 2003

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

aka: True PDF Work­flow with InDes­ign 2.0.x

aka: Its time to stop using leg­acy EPS!

A com­mon work­flow in the Print and Prepress industry is export­ing a page from applic­a­tions such as Page­Maker and QuarkX­press and pla­cing these back into the applic­a­tion and printing.

For example 1: You have cre­ated a page for pub­lic­a­tion, and you also need to cre­ate a lar­ger, poster size version.

Gen­er­ic­ally, you have a page in InDes­ign doc­u­ment “A” that needs to be incor­por­ated into InDes­ign doc­u­ment “B”

Tra­di­tion­ally, the pro­cess has been: Export the page as an EPS (Encap­su­lated Post­script) and place this back into a pic­ture box in the lay­out application.

With the advent of InDes­ign 2.0.x, this work­flow is out­dated and poten­tially dan­ger­ous from a qual­ity perspective.

The New, Mod­ern workflow:

Step 1:

Export the Page from InDes­ign 2.0.x doc­u­ment “A” as a PDF, spe­cific­ally a Acrobat 5.0 com­pat­ible PDF.

[1469] 1pdfworkflow.gif

Step 2:

Import the PDF into InDes­ign 2.0.x doc­u­ment “B”. In this example, the PDF has been placed into another doc­u­ment. Here, the Links palette shows the source PDF expor­ted from step 1 above.

[1470] 2pdfworkflow.gif

Why use PDF?

  1. PDFs are smal­ler than EPS files, and take less pro­cessing over­head to place in InDes­ign (no need to parse the Postscript)
  2. Export­ing Acrobat 5.0 PDFs from InDes­ign 2.0.x is extremely quick as there is no need to flat­ten the trans­par­ency con­tained in the InDes­ign document.
  3. Any trans­par­ency in the InDes­ign 2.0.x doc­u­ment “A” remains unflattened in the expor­ted Acrobat 5.0 PDFs. Once placed back into InDes­ign 2.0.x, it will recog­nise this and flat­ten the trans­par­ency inside the PDF before export­ing as Acrobat 4.0 PDF or print­ing to Postscript
  4. If expand­ing the size of the placed PDF, if flattened, there is the chance that the flattened ele­ments lose qual­ity — espe­cially at the places where ele­ments stitch together.

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