Chicago InDesign User Group
Meeting Notes Archive
March 15, 2007
Hosted by Digital Bootcamp, Chicago, thanks to Mike Carruth, Commander-in-Chief
Topic: Getting the Job Right: Best Production Practices
Presenter:
Tina DeJarld is a pre-press expert at Chicago Press, as well as VP and Print Production Director for Creative Quadrant, Inc., a design company she and her husband started. Tina’s mission is to provide expert production services and advice to clients so that the printing process is more reliable and predictable. (www.creativequadrant.com).
This meeting was sponsored by Chicago Press Corp. (www.chicagopress.net).
Tom Petrillo opened the meeting by announcing our next meeting on May 15 will be all about Creative Suite 3 (CS3). And because we will be expecting a big crowd, the meeting will take place at Columbia College, not Digital Bootcamp. More details to come…
Tina DeJarld gave a marvelous and very detailed presentation for the entire evening on Best Practices for print design using InDesign CS2. One of the best presenters we’ve ever had, Tina had obviously put many hours of work into creating a PDF doc to show from, which is brimming with great techniques and tricks. Luckily we are able to make this file available to you so be sure to go to:
Getting the Job Right – Best Production Practices
by Tina DeJarlds
 Download [PDF: 8.4 MB]
For this reason, I am not writing a comprehensive review of her talk but instead have picked out just some of the items to inspire you to seek out the original file.
Guides: Did you know that pressing Cmd or Ctrl while dragging out a guide gives you a spread guide, extending across two pages? Or pressing Shift when dragging out a guide snaps the guide to the ruler tick marks? Want to change the color of your guides? Go to Layer> Ruler Guides. And one of the friendliest things about guides, if you’re in Preview mode, no guides, it automatically switches you back to Normal viewing mode when you make a new guide. I was personally floored to learn how far Adobe has pushed the idea that guides are objects in ID. I know you can select them, specify their x-y position on the page, marquee them to delete them, etc. But I had no idea you could use Step And Repeat to get multiple guides. Didn’t know you could Copy and Paste them, even use the Align palette to distribute them evenly. Amazing!
Preview mode: one of the best ID features. When not in text mode, just press “w” to switch to preview, where all guides and frame edges, bleed items and hidden characters, magically vanish and even the white pasteboard fades to a medium gray. When in text mode, you can just “click off” or Deselect All, then type “w.” Or click the Preview button at the bottom rung of the toolbox. Preview has three modes, the default shows all the page content out to the trim edge. To include either the bleed or slug area, use the flyout menu from the Preview button on the toolbox.
Production views: Overprint Preview (View menu) flags the problem when white is set to overprint and objects disappear, among other things. Zoom to 4000%, very useful to get to high viewing levels for exact positioning, such as with butting or overlapped items. Separations Preview (Window> Output> Separations Preview), check your colors. Did you really want that spot color in there? Transparency Flattener Preview (Window> Output>) tells you which objects and text will be flattened due to transparency. Choose the display setting in the palette: All Affected Objects. Objects and type displayed in red will be flattened on output.
More on transparency: don’t apply an Opacity setting when all you want is to lighten your color. That engages transparency and adds more complexity to your file. Use a tint instead and avoid the pitfalls of transparency flattening. (see below for a cool tip on making tints). To avoid rasterized type, bring your text frames to the top of the stacking order. Also, delay flattening as long as possible, ideally at the back end (in the RIP of your offset or digital printing company), which is higher resolution and tuned to their press conditions. In fact, if your printer supports live transparency, your file won’t need to be flattened, even better.
PDF compatibility: when you make a PDF from ID, choose compatibility with Acrobat 5, 6 or later, but avoid Acrobat 4 (PDF 1.3) which does not support live transparency (it flattens everything in the process of making the PDF). Check with your printer to be sure they support “live transparency.” Seriously consider changing your printer if they say no or don’t know what you’re talking about.
Remap colors on output: use the Ink Manager to replace a color used in your file on the fly. Go to Print> Output panel. Select the color in the list you want to replace. Then from the Ink Alias popup, select a replacement color. If that color is not already in use in the file, set it up as a swatch first.
Corrupted ID files: Export the file (File> Export) to InDesign Interchange format (.inx), then open that file into InDesign. Cleans up the mess!
Unnamed colors. Like to mix CMYK colors on the fly? Swatches palette menu> Add Unnamed Colors. Here’s a cool tip when you’re using those CMYK sliders in the Color palette and you want to make the color lighter or darker but keep the same hue. Drag a slider pressing Shift and all the sliders move together.
Avoid JPEG. JPEG is a bitmap file format and makes text and vectors look awful, converting your clean edges to pixels. If you must use type in Photoshop, save the file as .pdf. Don’t save as native .psd because that type or vector data rasterizes when placed in InDesign.
Importing multiple graphics from the Finder, Win OS or Bridge. Drag and drop!
Updating multiple graphics from Links palette. When graphics have been modified since placed in ID, and you see the yellow triangle opposite the listing in the palette, you can update them all at one time by not selecting anything in the palette. Then Update Link from the Links palette menu.
Actual v. Effective ppi (pixel per inch). Though you may have started with a 300ppi image, but now that you’ve scaled it 175%, your “effective” resolution may be sub-standard. Check the Info palette for both numbers.
Text and type. Edit> Paste without Formatting if you want your pasted text to match your destination text. Format text without highlighting by selecting the frame(s) with the Select tool, black pointer, then click on the Type tool in the toolbox or just press T. Now you have access to the typesetting attributes on the Control palette so that all text in the frame will be affected. Does not work for frames that are threaded to other frames (multi-frame stories).
—The Chicago InDesign User Group is led by Jim Maivald, a freelance graphic designer and Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign, Acrobat and Dreamweaver, www.desktopdesign.cc/
—The Chicago InDesign User Group meeting notes have been prepared by Eda Warren, Adobe Certified Training Provider and Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign CS2
http://www.go-training.com/
Thanks to Tina DeJarld for help with these notes.
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