Chicago InDesign User GroupMeeting Notes Archive
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
InDesign® user group meeting at Digital Bootcamp, hosted by Mike Carruth
Topic
Successful printing from InDesign CS
Presenters
Sean O’Grady, from Kwik Kopy Chicago in downtown Chicago and James Wamser, an Adobe Certified Expert and Adobe Certified Print Specialist at Sells Printing near Milwaukee
Also: highlights of the recently released Acrobat® 7.0 from Clint Funk, Adobe Acrobat and Creative Suite Specialist and our fearless leader.
Notes
Getting jobs to “look good” is one thing. But the question always lingers — will it print? According to our guest speakers, the number of times that jobs come in that are trouble-free is pretty rare. James Wamser said he thinks they had one job last year that fell into that category. But I’m getting ahead of myself, since our first speaker was Sean O’Grady, from Kwik Kopy Chicago.com. They do a lot of prepress; it’s a seven man shop. They’ve been using InDesign since version 1.0. They offer a lot of services, including single-color and two-color offset, digital printing, large-format output, and more. Sean’s suggestions included:
- Don’t draw your own crop marks. Make your InDesign page the same dimensions as your job. (James later reiterated building your document size to final trim size.)
- For digital printing, don’t get closer than 1/8" to the edge of the piece.
- Don’t use Illustrator® to do a newsletter. (ha ha)
- Talk to your vendor as to how to set up your job. This point was reinforced also by James, Clint, and others as the cardinal rule in graphic design production. In fact, if the whole evening were to be summed up in one simple thought, this would be it.
- PDFs are fine, but he wants the original files, so that corrections can be easily made. Clint added that an expanded ability to make corrections in PDFs is now possible in Acrobat 7.0.
- Be sure your images are in CMYK. Colors in digital printing come out muddy when the color mode is RGB. (However, Tom Petrillo briefly mentioned that Adobe is recommending an RGB workflow as the future standard workflow, with conversion to CMYK taking place at output.)
- If you outline your fonts, you don’t have to send them. But you can't make edits.
- Transparency problems arise when type is stacked behind a drop-shadow. Keep type at the top of the stacking order for best results when transparency is involved.
- Resolution — he doesn’t want to get images that are four times what is needed. A 330 Mb EPS became an 80 Mb TIFF (in a 4.5-gig job folder!). The larger the format, the lower the resolution needed. For a 16' banner, only 32 dpi is needed since it’s seen from a distance.
James Wamser from Sells Printing Company (Sells.com) then took the helm and started with a brief look at Sells Printing. James personally specializes in software training, trouble-shooting for clients, and going on-site for his printing company. He started working with InDesign in 1998, one year before it was first released. As for setting up jobs, he emphasized using 8.5 by 11” single pages rather than setting up InDesign pages of 11” by 17” for docs that will fold to a standard page. This makes imposition easier. Don’t worry about “creep” in longer docs. The imposition software handles that problem perfectly — that’s the problem in a job of many pages, for which where the inner-most pages need bigger margins than pages on the outsides.
James spoke about fonts as being a big source of problem jobs. Sometimes people send him their entire font library — “just in case.” Or theyonly send a few of the fonts, because they “felt funny about sending all of them.” He reminded us that fonts in OS X reside in five places — from your personal folder to the system folder to network fonts, and beyond. The best solution is to use InDesign’s Package command, which collects all the fonts for your job, even the live fonts used in an imported EPS. James also pointed out that the Preflight command helps locate many problems in your job, like RGB images.
Other things James recommends, as well as tips from members:
- Don’t embed images; keep them externally linked (the default).
- If your job contains process and spot colors, most likely Sells will end up converting your spot colors to process at output, using that feature in the Ink Manager. Of course, they’ll check with you first to be sure you don’t want to have five or more colors in your job. He mentioned that only 40% of the spot color Pantone library does not shift when converted to CMYK.
- In the Preflight dialog, each panel has a Show Problems Only checkbox to bring your attention to what's needed.
- InDesign’s Preflight command, however, doesn’t catch everything — most namely, issues of resolution. A resolution of 225 or 250 dpi is adequate, but when they get jobs with resolutions below 200 dpi, they turn them back to the clients.
- “Actual” and “effective” resolutions for images that have been scaled in InDesign are reflected in the Links and Images panel of the Preflight command. The “effective” part is what really counts, of course. James says they rely most on FlightCheck by Markzware, which is a more professional level of preflighting that addresses resolution issues, among other things.
- InDesign’s Preflight also does not catch problems with bleeds. Check this yourself before you submit your job. Bleeds of 1/8” are standard.
- Sometimes your black type is outputting in CMYK, but you really want pure black. You can check this in Separations Preview (Window> Output Preview> Separations). Turn on each C-M-Y layer to see if your type displays. Be sure to apply Black in Swatches palette, not Registration color.
- PDF export problems — none of the PDF export presets (print, press, etc.) has printer marks turned on. It’s best to set up your own preset with printer marks on, set in the Marks and Bleeds panel, using .125 pt for weight. Offset is 12 pt, standard in the industry for the location of printer marks in relation to the trim edge.
- If you have transparency in your file (drop-shadows, feathering, blend modes, opacity settings, or imported silhouetted or cutout images), you should use Acrobat 4.0 (PDF 1.3). Acrobat 5.0 and 6.0 do support transparency — Acrobat 4.0 requires all files to be flattened. However, all files sent through the distiller are flattened regardless of which version you save them in. The issue is that most RIPs cannot process an unflattened PDF file, which is why James and Sean recommend Acrobat 4.0. Make sure that the transparency flattener setting is on High Resolution (Print dialog, Advanced panel, and same panel of Export PDF) for proper high-resolution flattening.
- Tip from Tom Petrillo — when CMS (color management) is turned on, your destination profile in the Advanced panel of PDF Export should not be the default US Sheetfed Coated v2. But instead, change to Document CMYK—US Web Coated (SWOP) v2. Doing so will avoid this problem of black outputting to four plates.
- More on PDF export — it’s generally agreed, a point made by David Sheffield, that when it comes to compression settings, in most cases you should turn off Downsample to 300 dpi. This can cause chunky-looking images. Tom also added that instead of leaving the type of compression up to InDesign, using the Automatic option, it’s better to make your own choice, usually JPEG.
Points Made in Q&A
- Beware — Drop-shadow offsets do not scale when type is scaled as an object, such as with the scale tool.
- Tom suggests that when you have a problem file, try exporting the file as InDesign interchange format, a format similar to XML. When you open it, your problems may have vanished.
- Tom also warned — that if your job is in CMYK, don’t use the six blend modes at the bottom of the blend modes pop-up menu (Transparency palette).
- Special credit goes to Mike Kanalis, from Reed Publishing, for his in-depth knowledge of complicated issues relating to transparency and PDF export.
Last, Clint Funk, our fearless leader, did a great demo on the new Acrobat 7.0, released January5. Here are a spattering of things he said:
- Splash screen — “Running Man” is gone. Replacing him are some lovely curves. Can you tell what they refer to?
- If you own the Creative Suite, then you must buy the Creative Suite 1.3 upgrade to upgrade to Acrobat 7.0 (not simply the Acrobat 7.0 upgrade). All 1.3 does is upgrade Acrobat. If you just got the A7 upgrade, you’ll have problems upgrading to CS 2.0 when it comes out.
- Review & Comment feature requires Acrobat 7.0 Pro to set up and Adobe Reader® 7.0 can now participate in the review process.
- One of the best new features — the Organizer — is much like the the File Browser in Photoshop. Manage your PDFs: You can open, print, and email PDFs from the Organizer. Also create PDFs from multiple files. And view thumbnails of all pages in a PDF file.
- Convert emails or entire message folders to PDF in MS Outlook, including links and attachments. However, it is for Windows users only. (Followed by boos.)
- There is major support for preflight and prepress with a print production palette.
- LifeCycle Designer — also for just Windows — great for forms creation.
- View PDF in Safari (Panther only).
- You can type a watermark directly in Acrbat 7.0 and not have to create it elsewhere, such as in Illustrator, turn it into a PDF, and then make a watermark.
- Comment and Markup and Send for Review features — new markup tools.
- There are new security measures, passwords, public key certificates. You can set a PDF to self-destruct on a given date with Adobe’s new Policy Server.
- Set up policies for permissions, and then apply them to various PDFs.
- In print production — fix hairlines that are too small to print properly — just one of a number of features including commands for preflight, trap presets, output preview, and converting colors (RGB to CMYK). Apply CMS profiles and rendering intents and using Ink Manager, including aliasing a color. And last but not least, transparency flattening.
Raffle
Lots of good raffle prizes and plenty of pizza.
Notes provided by Eda Warren, of Desktop Publishing Services, who is an Adobe Certified Training Provider and an Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign CS.
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