The Power of PDF
My niece came to me last week asking for help creating her yearbook page for school. She had a great design for filmstrips of images (how does a 17-year old know about filmstrips) that she needed to create in Photoshop.
It didn’t take us too long to assemble the images into Photoshop files. And then she told me that the actual Photoshop files would be laid out in “something called In Design, Aunt Sandee. Have you heard of In Design?”
After I picked myself up off the floor, I explained that I indeed knew about InDesign. So I thought it would be good if we laid out the InDesign page for her.
Fortunately, I knew enough to ask her if the school was using the “purple” version of InDesign (CS3) or the “butterfly” version (CS2). She said butterfly. So I laid out the page in CS2.
Unfortunately, yesterday, when she brought the page to school they were unable to open it. Even though this is a real fancy-dancy, thousands-upon-thousands of dollars a year, private school in Manhattan, NYC, the yearbook staff only has InDesign CS.
I thought about sending a .inx file from CS2 to let them open the page. But as soon as I started to explain what an .inx file is, I heard my niece’s eyes glaze over and her brain freeze. “Uhhhh, they might not understand that.” I backtracked.
So, I exported the whole page as a PDF with no downsampling and no compression. (She was very concerned about quality. In her mind PDF equals bad quality.)
I sent her an email with the PDF with these instructions:
——————————————
OK, now, this is what you have to do to get it on the page.
Open the ID document to your page.
Choose File> Place.
Find the PDF I just sent you.
Click Open.
Now, click on your page to create the image. (You don’t have to draw anything first.)
Then, position the image in the right position.
That’s it!
——————————————–
Today I got an email from her:
AUNT SANDEEE I’M AT SCHOOL NOW AND IT WORKED!!! WOO HOO THANK YOU SO SO SO MUCH
loveeee ya!
xo,
liz
————————————————
What I like about the PDF is that it was simple, and it worked!
WOO HOO indeed!
Did you show her your name on the Visual Quickstart Guide?
Yes, I actually sent her back to school with a copy of the VQS.
We used to love ID CS. Now I bet not one of us would be comfortable using it…
Ah, “The Power of PDF”…I love to hear that others share that sentiment.
PDF is indeed great, great stuff. But with the great, great new ability of ID CS3 to place native INDD files, I can probably cut down to half my consumption of PDF files in all my ID work. So upgrade, ye slackers — placing INDD files in ID saves tons of time and trouble!
Yes Klaus, gone is the day of copying and pasting from one document to another. Truly easy to place an INDD file in the other.
I agree about the benefits of Placing one ID file into another.
However, I feel that, as a general rule, it is better to use a PDF if there is a chance that the placed image will be sent out of your local organization.
Placing ID files is great when you can assume that the connection to linked images and fonts will be active.
Placing PDF files is great for bundling all that stuff up and sending it all out.
In the case of my niece, I would have used PDF even if the school had ID CS3.
But if you send the final job out as PDF, it doesn’t matter that along the way you placed some InDesign pages inside your document. Does it?
Dave
>But if you send the final job out as PDF, it doesn’t matter that along the way you placed some InDesign pages inside your document. Does it?
No, it doesn’t in that case.
Just as a simple example of how I’m using placed INDD files in ID: I’m producing a 24-age magazine, and to give all involved a bird’s eye view of the whole shebang I’ve placed the whole INDD, arranged as 12 spreads, on one landscape page. So whenever I’ve done some notable work on the master INDD file, I just update the Overview file and send off that as a PDF. Previously, I could also have produced this Overview, yes, but only via having to first regenerate the whole 24 pages as a PDF, which takes several minutes due to the graphics being pretty heavy. Now, this process is down to almost-zero time & effort.
Sandee: “I thought about sending a .inx file from CS2 to let them open the page. But as soon as I started to explain what an .inx file is, I heard my niece’s eyes glaze over and her brain freeze.”
What’s to explain, what’s to understand? Simply by clicking on it, the .INX extension will make ID open the .INX file automatically even in CS, only requiring a plain Save operation at the end. But I guess that, at fancy-schmanzy private schools in Manhattan, most brains might work a bit slower than in the normal world . . .
>What’s to explain, what’s to understand? Simply by clicking on it, the .INX extension… But I guess that, at fancy-schmanzy private schools in Manhattan, most brains might work a bit slower than in the normal world
It’s not how fast their brains work, it’s that no one there would have ever heard of an .inx file.
And then I would have had to explain what the .inx file was.
And even then I might have had to deal with missing/modified links.
What was so nice about the PDF is that it is one file with everything neatly in it.
Sandee, I would just have given her the INX and the other linked files in one folder and told her: “here sweetie, just click on the ‘my neat file.inx’ file!” End of problems.
But yes, PDF is great and trouble-free — it’s just that I find the INX format so fascinating, as a tiny INX can build a huge INDD file. So it’s amazingly bandwidth-saving. And, I will steadfastly maintain, INX requires NO understanding or explanation to either open or save.
Hey Klaus, sometime you can’t open inx files in older versions of ID unless you update that particular version, so If CS is version 3 you have to find the updated for that program to make it 3.01 or something like that.
“But I guess that, at fancy-schmanzy private schools in Manhattan, most brains might work a bit slower than in the normal world . . .”
That’s pretty low. What a jerk.
I am still using InDesign CS at work to lay out our magazine! I still love what it can do but it’s hard listening to the podcasts/video casts and hearing what CS3 can do.
And regarding the .INX file, at the design school I went to in Milan students had problems with it so tended to not bother using it. I know it should be easy though.
I have a client (high school) that uses CS for their yearbook layouts. Their publisher provides them with CS. They are required to use specific templates for the layout. They are also have a script for placing images.
If your nieces yearbook happens to use this publisher, an .inx file would not work.
I’ve had some problems recently with this. I place a PDF in my layout, and it displays in a very low resolution preview, even if I change its display performance setting to high-quality. This wouldn’t bother me that much, except that when I export the layout to a new PDF, whether flattened or unflattened, the placed PDF comes out in the same crappy pixelated preview.
Anyone know if I might be doing something wrong or how I can prevent this?
Jonno: You’re using File > Place to import the PDF, right? Check the Links panel to make sure there is not a Modified or Missing icon there. Sounds like a frustrating problem!
I had a similar problem earlier today. It was placing a PDF made from Quark into InDesign. It exported pixelated no matter what settings I used.
David: I thought of that, especially because I use Version Cue and with my bad habit of not always checking in an updated file I thought maybe links were getting out of sync and outdated. Alas, it still comes out pixelated even with all links up to date…
I stumbled on a semi-solution this evening. If I embed the placed PDF rather than link to it, the preview comes up in perfect vector quality, and so does the resulting final PDF. But obviously this is far from an ideal solution because of the embedding…