www.nickhodge.com

Another inter­est­ing InDes­ign 2.0 dis­cov­ery this week. I’ll write up a doc­u­ment about this once I get my head around the implic­a­tions — and can cre­ate some rel­ev­ant screen dumps.

Many RIPs (and not just older RIPs) have sig­ni­fic­ant per­form­ance issues with images that are rotated, scaled (espe­cially in dif­fer­ent % in X and Y dimen­sions) and cropped into small clip­ping paths. RIPs have some intens­ive math­em­at­ical trans­form­a­tions to out­put these images to plates/film at very high res­ol­u­tion (2400dpi/133lpi) — tak­ing inor­din­ate amounts of time to gen­er­ate sep­ar­a­tions. Nor­mally, the work­flow is to ensure that all images placed into your lay­out are pre-rotated and scaled. With InDes­ign, by for­cing an early change such as this you are los­ing the bene­fits of flex­ible, late-stage edit­ing work­flow. How­ever, how do you solve the RIP time issue?

What I (and Matt) found is another “side effect” of the trans­par­ency flattener. Prior to apply­ing a trans­par­ency effect, it pre-rotates, scales and clips images at print/export PDF time. There­fore, we can use the spe­cial “set the frame to 99.9% Nor­mal trans­par­ency” tech­nique to force an image through the flattener without chan­ging the under­ly­ing image. (ref: InDes­ign 2.0: Print­ing Out­put Choices and Flattener Tricks (includ­ing force Grey­scale export!)) It is import­ant to apply the trans­par­ency on the frame. Where this really works well is in extremely large images.

The end res­ult is a smal­ler file, that RIPs extremely fast. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief — trans­par­ency can sig­ni­fic­antly improve RIP time.