Wel­come to Adobe InDes­ign CS

For more inde­pth art­icles: Adobe InDes­ign: Prepress Tech­niques



This is writ­ten in a sim­ilar man­ner to: Acrobat 6.0 Pro­fes­sional: Graph­ics, Print, Prepress Over­view



Since writ­ing this intro­duc­tion, Adobe has released: Adobe InDes­ign CS Print­ing Guide for Ser­vice Pro­viders

InDes­ign CS, the third major revi­sion of InDes­ign, con­tains many new prepress fea­tures that solid­i­fies my belief that InDes­ign is the premiere desktop prepress tool on the mar­ket today.

Hav­ing worked between many pre-release test­ers and the Product Team and Engin­eers for nearly two years — it is such a relief to be able to talk pub­lic­ally about all the “new stuff”

What is this Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite?

The Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite is a new applic­a­tion that com­bines the full desktop ver­sions of Pho­toshop CS, Illus­trator CS, InDes­ign CS, GoLive CS and Acrobat 6.0 Pro­fes­sional with a new piece of tech­no­logy called Ver­sion Cue. This new applic­a­tion installs with a single serial num­ber, comes on single CD and is a applic­a­tion suite. This InDes­ign CS that comes with either Cre­at­ive Suite Premium or Stand­ard is the same as the single copy version.

Sys­tem Requirements

InDes­ign CS (and the other CS applic­a­tions) requires Win­dows 2000sp3, Win­dows XP Home or Pro­fes­sional. On the Mac, InDes­ign CS like Acrobat 6.0 requires at least MacOS X 10.2.4. That’s cor­rect: no MacOS 9 sup­port. If you are receiv­ing InDes­ign CS files, you are going to need a MacOS X to run the files out. From a high qual­ity print per­spect­ive, sav­ing back­wards is not an option.

New Prepress Features

Sep­ar­a­tion Preview

Hav­ing been exposed to this par­tic­u­lar piece of engin­eer­ing since prior to InDes­ign 2.0’s announce­ment, this has to be my favour­ite fea­ture. It alone will change prepress per­cep­tions of InDesign’s status as the best tool to work with on the desktop.

Until the advent of Quite Reveal­ingfor Acrobat 4/5, Acrobat 6.0 Pro­fes­sional (Acrobat 6.0 Pro­fes­sional: Graph­ics, Print, Prepress Over­view)- the only way to pre­view the plates that would appear at some stage of the print pro­cess was to print sep­ar­a­tions as Post­script and Distill.

InDes­ign CS adds a new fea­ture called Sep­ar­a­tion Pre­view that is a “mode” for lay­out. You can work com­pletely in this mode; pla­cing images, chan­ging swatches, edit­ing text if you like — and see how the final plates will appear whilst still edit­ing the document.

The above shows Cyan and Black plates, with a Ink Dens­ity count on a per-plate basis.

This shows a sep­ar­a­tion pre­view high­light­ing one spot col­our, with the black text knock­ing out correctly.

I remem­ber first see­ing this fea­ture and being on cloud 9 for hours. It has to be exper­i­enced. Thanks Matt.

Flattener Pre­view

Trans­par­ency, the ground-breaking set of fea­tures added in InDes­ign 2.0, provides design­ers scope to cre­ate eye catch­ing lay­outs. When it comes to out­put, how­ever, some of the print aspects require finessing.

To aid the print side, the Flattener Pre­view will show what ele­ments are going to be effected by trans­par­ency, and in which way. The Trans­par­ency Flattener is still required in Post­script 2/3 and PDF/X workflows.

The areas high­lighted in red above are Trans­par­ent Objects that will res­ult in some trans­par­ency flat­ten­ing at output.

Ink Limit Preflight

Com­mon in news­print and other print applic­a­tions where the total ink dens­ity is tightly con­trolled, InDes­ign CS will now per­mit a pre­view of a lay­out — and high­light ele­ments that are above to total ink limit as specified.

In the image above, an Ink cov­er­age limit of 280% is spe­cified: the areas high­lighted in red on the page have more ink cov­er­age than this percentage.

Bleeds and Slugs

No, this is not going postal on the evil garden pests. InDes­ign 2.0 added the abil­ity to print with inde­pend­ent bleed-per-side in a doc­u­ment. In InDes­ign CS, doc­u­ments can be cre­ated with pre­defined bleed and slug areas:

These pre­defined Bleeds and Slugs can be used when print­ing, without retyp­ing the appro­pri­ate values.

In this image, Print Pre­view with Bleed has been requested.

To make life easier when cre­at­ing doc­u­ments in InDes­ign CS, page dimen­sions includ­ing Bleeds and Slugs can be saved.

Another com­monly reques­ted fea­ture from long­time QuarkX­press users is the abil­ity to see the ‘page edge’ when pla­cing ele­ments. Guess what, its here:

In the above screen dump, the black line is the trim size of the page, clearly shown through the image.

Word Count

Not strictly a Prepress fea­ture, but I am going to incor­por­ate it here! Yes, there is a word count in InDes­ign CS:

Not only a word count: InDes­ign CS also counts sen­tences, lines and char­ac­ters. No more need for InDes­ign 2.0: Word Count using Visual Basic! The above image depicts a text frame that con­tains a cer­tain num­ber of characters/words etc, and the “+61″ indic­ates that there is over­set text.

Info Palette

In PDF deliv­ery of final for-print doc­u­ments, the two major errors that cause prepress head­aches are RGB ele­ments and low res­ol­u­tion images. InDes­ign always con­ver­ted RGB ele­ments in bit­maps to CMYK (if print­ing CMYK). InDes­ign CS adds the con­ver­sion of ele­ments in RGB that are inside placed PDF ele­ments to CMYK. (InDes­ign 2.0 and CS have a tech­nique that will force EPS into CMYK or Grey­scale: InDes­ign 2.0: Print­ing Out­put Choices and Flattener Tricks (includ­ing force Grey­scale export!))

On the mat­ter of DPI, how­ever, there has been a reli­ance on the designer on “guess­ing” the print DPI (oth­er­wise known as effect­ive DPI) by cal­cu­lat­ing the per­cent­age scal­ing by the ori­ginal DPI. InDes­ign CS has a new palette known as the Info palette that pre­views the DPI of a placed image element:

The Info palette above shows that the placed image is a JPEG in the RGB col­ourspace, and due to scal­ing of the image, its print (effect­ive) res­ol­u­tion is 288dpi in both dimensions.

Mixed Ink Support

An ink swatch in InDes­ign CS can be what is a Mixed Ink swatch con­tain­ing spot col­ours and pro­cess colours.

InDes­ign CS also adds a new type of swatch known as Mixed Ink Group which eases the mix­ing of two spot col­ours into a vary­ing com­bin­a­tion of percentages.

Sup­port for Duo­tone Pho­toshop files

DCS is the thorn in the side of the Prepress pro­fes­sional. It forces print work­flows into sep­ar­ated out­put at a very early stage — and is a leg­acy of QuarkX­press. In our mod­ern, com­pos­ite work­flows — DCS is a leg­acy that would be rather forgotten.

InDes­ign CS changes the scene in rather a dra­matic way. DCS 1 and 2 files cre­ated from Pho­toshop (bit­maps only) placed into InDes­ign CS are recom­bined into com­pos­ite for com­pos­ite PDF/Postscript out­put. DCS1, for the sake of clar­ity, is a presep­ar­ated format where each plate is broken into a file: one each for C, M, Y and K (there is not spot col­our sup­port in DCS1). DCS2, in com­par­ison, is a single file con­tain­ing each plate — and can sup­port spot colours.

For Pho­toshop files and designs that con­tain vec­tor ele­ments and trans­par­ency, this tech­nique still applies: InDes­ign 2.0: Pho­toshop with Spots, InDes­ign and Com­pos­ite PDF

InDes­ign CS also includes sup­port for TIFF with spot col­our chan­nels, Pho­toshop PSD with spot chan­nels (includ­ing Duo­tones, Tri­tones and Quadtones) and Pho­toshop EPS.

PDF/X Sup­port

Like Acrobat 6.0, InDes­ign CS sup­ports export­ing PDFs are PDF/X com­pli­ant. More than just a ver­sion PDF, com­pli­ance also involves ensur­ing the ele­ments used in the PDF match the strict ISO specification.

What is PDF/X? From the FAQ on the PDF/X site: “PDF/X is not an altern­at­ive to PDF, it’s a focused sub­set of PDF designed spe­cific­ally for reli­able prepress data inter­change. It’s also an applic­a­tion stand­ard, as well as a file format stand­ard. In other words, it defines how applic­a­tions cre­at­ing and read­ing PDF/X files should behave.”

PDF/X is a set of inter­na­tional stand­ards: PDF/X-1a:2001 (ISO 15930–1:2001) and PDF/X-3 (ISO 15930–3:2002). PDF is a very broad format: it per­mits the cre­ation of doc­u­ments ready for web deliv­ery through to very high qual­ity book pro­duc­tion. PDF/X sim­pli­fies what can be in a PDF to a known range of para­met­ers. This known, and gen­er­ally accept­able range there­fore gives other soft­ware in the work­flow a known tar­get. If a PDF is PDF/X com­pli­ant, there are two keys added to the PDF file.

Print Work­flow Changes

A topic deeply exposed here InDes­ign 2.0 Prepress Tips & Tech­niques, there has been a fun­da­mental change in the mech­an­ism InDes­ign CS uses to print placed PDFs. Placed PDFs (and there­fore placed nat­ive .ai files, too) pass through a dif­fer­ent print mech­an­ism sim­ilar to print­ing through the trans­par­ency flattener. A side effect of this print mech­an­ism is that ele­ments are con­ver­ted to the Print col­our space (CMYK, Grey­scale) plus a new side effect. The placed ele­ments are Trapped.

With InDes­ign CS, placed PDFs pass through InDesign’s inbuilt Trap­ping engine. Now you can trap com­pos­ite, untrapped PDFs from vari­ous sources (like QuarkX­press) and gen­er­ate a com­pos­ite trapped Post­script file, and there­fore PDF. This tech­nique still applies: InDes­ign 2.0: Gen­er­at­ing Com­pos­ite, Trapped PDFs

A small change, and prob­ably not doc­u­mented any­where, is the abil­ity scale in the “decimal point” range when print­ing. InDes­ign 2.0 had a restric­tion of scal­ing at print time in whole num­ber incre­ments (100%, 101%, 102% etc) whereas InDes­ign CS sup­ports per­cent­ages such as 100.1%. This is espe­cially required in pack­aging style print­ing on flexo­graphic presses.

Sum­mary

If you are into lay­ing out doc­u­ments with great design, InDes­ign CS raises the bar for its com­pet­it­ors. From a Prepress per­spect­ive, InDes­ign CS is dis­tinctly ahead of the crowd.