InDesign Help

Adobe InDesign allows you to place Adobe Photoshop (.psd) files directly into page layouts. But what happens when you export that layout to a PDF? Does it retain any of the Photoshop file characteristics? Here’s the deal:

• As long as you use PDF v1.4 or higher, it uses the same transparency model as Photoshop, so it will retain all transparency.
• PDFs don’t support “embedded .psd” like they do some other file formats, so essentially the file will be flattened. PDF does support layers, but PDF has an entirely different layering system than Photoshop has. It is completely uncompatible, your Photoshop file layers will not come across into the PDF.

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Mark recently wrote in with a problem he was having in InDesign CS3.  The color black printed out slightly more grayish than he was anticipating.  He is using Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) but the problem and solution are the same on Windows XP and Vista as well as when using InDesign CS or CS2.  Mark’s problem was that his blacks (K value) appeared fine on screen but didn’t have the rich black look when printing out.  Although difference between printer and monitor can often be varied and complex the most likely solution is also the simplest.

If you’re having troubles with black printing out either too gray or too black than you probably want to check your appearance of black setting.  While the problem could be color management,  print driver, type of paper or a variety of other things it’s most likely a simple preference.  In fact this comes up so often and is so important it has it’s own section in preferences.

Solution:

Navigate to Preferences>Appearance of Black

Adjust the preference so that On Screen and Printing / Exporting both have the same black setting.  Rich black (also known as true black) will use a 100k black value as well as cmy coloring in order to get you the darkest, richest black possible.  That’s not to say you need to use rich black but I highly recommend syncing what you see with what you print.  Changing this preference will also affect which type of black is exported to pdf, rich black or accurate black.

I hope that helps.

It’s that time of year again, Macworld time.  It’s a fun and exciting time in the desktop publishing world, especially as this world is increasingly becoming a “Mac World”.   Mac’s have long reigned supreme in the world of graphics, typography and layout and with each passing year the excitement continues to grow.

As a lead up to Macworld Apple has announced the new Mac Pro.  These bad boys will rock out at up to 3.2 ghz, support up to 4 terabytes of HD space, have 8 cores and be able to handle 32 gigs of ram.  By all accounts this is the machine of the future, perfect for all your Leopard and Adobe needs.  Most importantly though, for InDesign CS3 users, this year’s Macs should cause no trouble for the Creative Suite products.  Unlike the switch to the Intel chips these new machines have nothing but upside.

We will keep you posted on all the new and exciting developments as they unfold but until then here are the basic facts:

What: MacWorld 2008

When: January 14-18, 2008

Where: The Moscone Center.  747 Howard St.  San Fransisco, California 94103

Why: If you use InDesign you most likely have some connection to Apple products

How: By any means necessary

There is a pretty interesting conversion going on over at PrintPlanet about Print to Web. It’s not specifically about InDesign, but I figure many of you InDesign folks out there may be interested in this.

In a sense, print to web is kind of ANTI-InDesign, since it’s basically just form data that gets plugged into templates that go straight to digital presses. But somebody has to design to those templates, right?

And that’s fancy Print to Web, it can also be just upload-a-PDF-and-we-print-it. This is a highly competitive market which nudges out the whole world of Prepress. As someone who has spent a good deal of time as a Prepress person, I’m saying thats a scary thought. I’d say about 1% of customer files require no adjustment before hitting presses. Without some human intervention in those files and the machines doing the printing, quality takes a huge hit.