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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

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InDesign Prepress: Text and the Transparency Flattener

By Nick Hodge | October 4, 2004

Why is my text prin­ted from InDes­ign (a) fat (b) out­lined © fuzzy (d) or all of the above?

This art­icle describes the Adobe Sup­port Data­base Text Is Ras­ter­ized When You Print to a RIP from InDes­ign (2.0 on Win­dows or Mac OS)

In this example, you can see there has been a Pho­toshop file placed into a layout:

The Pho­toshop file on the red-marked layer (named: “pho­toshop file”) has been masked out of a back­ground image, and saved as a .PSD . A text wrap has also been applied to this Pho­toshop files alpha chan­nel (or trans­par­ency) caus­ing the text in the yel­low layer (named: “body text”) to wrap. Noth­ing too strange about this, how­ever when prin­ted to Post­script and Dis­tilled, the fol­low­ing occurs:

This is a screen dump of the PDF gen­er­ated from the InDes­ign CS file above (Print to Post­script as CMYK, using the [High Res­ol­u­tion] Trans­par­ency Flattener Style. PDF gen­er­ated using Acrobat Distiller)

As you can see, around the marker “A”, the text looks “fat­ter” and “fuz­zier” than the text next to the marker “B”. This is the res­ult of the trans­par­ency flattener. (NB: in Acrobat, in Edit>Preferences, Dis­play if you turn on the “Smooth Line Art” option, this fuzzi­ness goes away.)

Lets zoom into the area where the Pho­toshop file and the body text over­lap. You can see in the above image that the red out­line of the image over­laps cer­tain lines in the under­ly­ing body text. In this instance, the Trans­par­ency Flattener has decided to cov­ert the all the text to out­lines in the lines that run under­neath the image.

The effect we are see­ing here is the Trans­par­ency Flattener in action. In Post­script, there is no way to have a semi-transparent image (the masked por­tion of the car) blend into type. There­fore, the flattener con­verts the rel­ev­ant text to out­lines and “clips” into the out­line shape any image inform­a­tion that is required to gen­er­ate out­put. The import­ant end goal is to gen­er­ate out­put in print that matches the design­ers intent.

To an aver­age observer, at high res­ol­u­tions (I have examples at 2400/133lpi Computer-to-Plate out­put) — its dif­fi­cult for the naked eye to pick “out­lined” vs “nor­mal” type with serif text at low point sizes.

How do you solve the problem?

There are two pos­sible solu­tions to this prob­lem. One key point I would like to make before I con­tinue is that you must choose one path or the other for the whole job.

Choice 1: Con­vert All Text to Outlines.

InDes­ign 2.0, Edit>Transparency Flattener Styles… Cre­ate a New Trans­par­ency Flattener style that turns on the “Force Text to Out­lines” option.

Now when print­ing using this Flattener Style to the Dis­til­ler (ie: same pro­cess as above), the end res­ult will look like:

The res­ult is that all the text in the doc­u­ment is con­ver­ted to out­lines. When you com­pare a page prin­ted (at 2400 dpi/133 lpi) with text con­ver­ted to out­lines side by side with a page where the text is nor­mal, the dif­fer­ence is just not­ic­able to the naked eye.

If you use this flattener style con­sist­ently through­out the job, the res­ult will be that all the text looks con­sist­ent. The down­side is that the text is no longer text — it’s paths — unsearch­able and to a trained eye slightly fatter.

Choice 2: Change Layer Ordering

This is my pre­ferred option, and when design­ing doc­u­ments in InDes­ign its best to fol­low a pro­cess where all body text in the top­most layer.

In the InDes­ign doc­u­ment, I am going to change the order of the lay­ers so the body text sits above the image:

In the above example, you can see that the “pho­toshop file” layer is under­neath the “body text” layer.

QuarkX­Press Users: don’t panic! As you would real­ise, in Xpress, your text wrap is based on the pos­i­tion­ing of objects in lay­ers. Images above text pushes the text out of the way: cre­at­ing text wrap. Not so in InDes­ign. Text wrap in InDes­ign is object-to-object based. It doesn’t mat­ter that the image is under­neath the text, it will still cause the text above to wrap around.

Prepress oper­at­ors: don’t panic! Chan­ging layer order­ing like this will not cause InDes­ign 2.0 to re-wrap the text.

What is the result?

In this final res­ult, you can see that the text has not been con­ver­ted to out­lines. This example was prin­ted from InDes­ign 2.0 using the stand­ard [High Res­ol­u­tion] flattener style.

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