InDesignSecrets Podcast 037
Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-037.mp3 (12.2 MB, 25:31 minutes)
or read the transcript of this podcast.
- Results from last week’s Quizzler — and the winner!
- The Great Debate: Export to PDF vs. Write PostScript and Distill?
- Updating multiple images at once
- Second Quizzler! With a cool prize from Trumatch (see below)
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: The Smooth tool
Links mentioned in the podcast:
Adobe’s Find a Print Service Provider page
Our InDesign CS2 Keyboard Shortcuts Poster
Sells Printing in Wisconsin (printed our poster)
Quizzler instructions: If you have an answer to this episode’s Quizzler, don’t post it here! E-mail it to info@indesignsecrets.com with “Quizzler” in the Subject. One winner will be chosen randomly from all the correct answers received by midnight, December 8, 2006. The winner will be mailed a set of Colorfinder process color swatchbooks (coated and uncoated) from Trumatch, a $170 value. Remember, don’t post your answer here! You’ll ruin it for everyone!
Sponsors for this episode:
Markzware (InDesign plug-in developer)
Special offer for podcast listeners extended until Dec. 31 2006:
20% off any Markzware product! Go to their online store and enter
the coupon code IDSECRET during checkout to get the discount.
Trumatch (”Colorfinder,” their process color swatch book system)
Listen to the podcasts for a chance to win two Colorfinder books,
Coated and Uncoated, a $170.00 value.
Listener Comment Line: +1-206-888-INDY (-4639)
Talk to us, baby: Leave a message!
Hi, is the wrong podcast linked here? I feel like it’s deja vu. Great work on the site and all the podcasts. And the poster is wonderful.
Sorry, Sonya! We’ve fixed that pesky wrong link now. I’m glad you’re enjoying the podcast, site, and poster. Happy InDesigning!
While the issue of which preset to use is something you’ve tabled for a future podcast, the issue of how to choose one when printing to AdobePDF is something worth attending to.
With Export PDF, the choice of preset is “in your face” in the dialog. With Print to PostScript, you get to save into a watched folder for which you have set joboptions for Distiller.
But how do you make this choice when printing to AdobePDF? The answer is: you need to click the Printer… button in InDesign’s Print dialog, then, after ignoring the annoying warning alert, activate the unlabeled third drop-down menu and choose PDF Options. The presets/joboptions are then available in the drop-down named Adobe PDF Settings.
If you miss this step, you’ll get the current Distiller default joboptions applied to your print job, which might not be what you want.
Dave
You’re absolutely right, Dave, and thanks for chiming in with that extra info. I listened to the podcast today and thought, “dang, forgot to mention how to choose a joboption when you print to the AdobePDF 7 printer.”
Another thing you can do there in the Printer… area (on Windows I think the button is “Settings…”) is you can name the PDF and figure out where it’s going to save it … and you can instruct ID to open the PDF in Acrobat when it’s done.
Here are a few reasons I often use to Print to PDF instead of Exporting.
- When I need a Grayscale PDF out of a color document. Export to PDF does not allow you to create a GrayScale PDF. Print to PDF yes.
- When I need to Scale up or Down a PDF, Export to PDF does not offer you to enter any scale % value when creating a PDF. Printing Yes.
- When I need to create a PDF that is of another orientation than the one in the document. Export to PDF does not allow you to do that. Printing yes.
See for the issue on taking the ‘direct’ PDF vs. the Distiller route also the excellent Adobe seminar by Dov Isaacs (Reliable PDF Print Publishing Workflows), which he gave (and still gives I believe) at various locations in Europe. On the dutch section of the Adobe site, there is actually a link to the slides used in his seminar in Amsterdam, last november. But beware, the PDF is extremely large (some 200 Mb). Still, an excellent seminar and a lot of myths were busted by an entertaining Isaac.
In short: let the printers’ RIP do its job, so don’t flatten yourself, don’t outline fonts and use the direct PDF route.
For all those interested: the actual link is http://www.adobe.com/nl/pdfs/20061108_Reliable_PDF_Seminar.pdf
I always use a PS to Distill workflow because it’s just the standard way that has create zero bad feedbacks out of 120,000 pdfs I made since ID 2.0.
And I use the Watched Folders technique on a remote Mac + Automator Scripts to create huge batch processing (8,000 PDFs created during the whole night).
Hard to achieve with the Export PDF workflow.
Hey, by the way, if you want more on the Export PDF vs. Distill argument, see Steve Werner’s post on this. We should have mentioned that earlier!
Your comment about smaller files is illustrated as follows:
I had a small booklet with an image repeated many many times. The exported pdf was 1 GB and the distilled pdf was only 1 MB.
CS 2 is somewhat better, but I’ve found that exported pdfs are on average twice as large as distilled files.
Just a quick note on Dave’s comment. On Windows the printer button he mentioned is labeled setup.
Its really great that you posted about printers that are more CS and PDF savvy. However, our company likes to use minority and women owned or operated printers. Can you get me a list of those? We have visited many across the country, over the years but they can’t handle PDF workflow or the high volume we need printed. Please help. Thanks
Another difference between export and print:
Place an Illustrator EPS file that contains a spot color. In ID, set this color to be a process build.
When exported, this color indeed is a process build in the PDF. When printed, the color remains a spot.
FYI, .ai files do not behave the same way; in both cases an .ai will end up as process.
Craig, I wonder if it would make any difference if you set the opacity of the EPS file to 99.9% in the Transparency palette. That will force InDesign to read and redraw the image using the Flattener technology, and perhaps it would do the conversion then.