Atlanta InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

Monday, June 9, 2003
Our June meeting was well-attended, and we were pleased to see a mix of familiar and new faces, including an instructor from the Art Institute and her students. (Hello, Vickey!) Please continue to introduce your friends and colleagues to the Atlanta InDesign user group: It’s a lot of fun, with lively interchange and the opportunity to share great tips with each other!

Noha Edell of Adobe Systems showed the fantastic effects that can be achieved by placing native Photoshop® and Illustrator® files and then invoking InDesign’s opacity controls and Blending Modes. She demonstrated the ease with which a designer can select a placed graphic, jump to Photoshop or Illustrator to make a modification, then return to InDesign as the graphic automatically updates in the layout. Noha, who is quite passionate about InDesign, was really on a roll: The audience was having trouble taking notes while laughing uproariously. One attendee had earlier expressed his fondness for control in QuarkXPress, and Noha used “control” as a focal point for her presentation. She would show InDesign’s Drop Shadow feature, then say, “But Quark [XPress] gives you so much control, doesn’t it?” By the end of Noha’s session, it was clear from the audience reaction and the look on the gentleman’s face that InDesign’s features easily trump Quark’s stodgy interface and limited capabilities.

In the second segment, Claudia McCue of Practicalia, LLC spoke about the repercussions of using transparency. That little Transparency palette may look innocent and harmless, but it’s one of the most dangerous tools in InDesign if not invoked responsibly. One of the easiest ways to ensure successful output is to use layers to “quarantine” transparent components. Claudia gave these tips:

Place text in a top-most layer, alone (if your design will allow it). InDesign will then maintain text, without imposing vectorizing or rasterization that might be necessary if the text were intermixed with transparent components.
Place elements with drop-shadows in their own layers (as long as they don’t overlap, several can safely cohabit a layer).
Use spot-colors and transparency or blending modes together very cautiously. In particular, Difference, Exclusion, Hue, Saturation, Color, and Luminosity blending modes can result in spot components being converted to process colors during printing, which is not what you want.
When using transparency in Illustrator files, better output will be achieved by placing the native AI file into InDesign and imaging from there, rather than directly from Illustrator.
Use Acrobat® as a way to check the results of flattening: create a PDF using your Flattener Style, then view it in Acrobat.

Note: your file may be correctly built, but an imaging device that doesn't fully implement PostScript® Level 2 or (ideally) Level 3 may not image correctly. (The “cutoff” point is PostScript v.3015 and above, if you’re ever curious about your printer?)

Claudia also attempted to illuminate the mysteries of the Flattener settings. Creating PDFs is a good way to visualize what flattening really does to output. A directly exported, unflattened PDF contains native transparency: All the components can be selected and moved and transparency is still intact. But since printing to PostScript requires flattening, a PDF distilled from that PostScript file demonstrates that all the transparent components have been replaced with opaque “stunt doubles.” Different areas of the “patchwork quilt” produced will be of different resolutions, depending on the flattener style invoked. Now you know what your laser printer sees!

Our raffle winners

Rick: Photoshop 7; Photoshop Classroom In a Book
Bill: Inside the Publishing Revolution, the history of Adobe Systems
Note: Rick originally won this, and Bill, a big fan of all things Adobe, offered him cash for it! Rick quite graciously handed Bill the book gratis. What a gentleman!
Jane: Acrobat 6.0
Sunny: InDesign 2.0
Greg: Photoshop Elements
Aron: InDesign Classroom in a Book
Vickey: Total Training InDesign 2.0 DVD
Altus: Total Training Photoshop DVD

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