Nick Hodge's Blog

Visit the new InDesign Prepress Section: Adobe InDesign: Prepress Techniques

Comments on Creo Prinergy and InDesign 2.0

In Australia, the most common RIP I see in highend platemaking work is the Creo Prinergy series

This particular system takes in Postscript and PDF, and foes through a process of Normalising the input into PDF. As a part of this process, it can preflight and check the incoming stream to ensure a quality printed result.

Prinergy takes natively exported InDesign 2.0 PDFs sucessfully, and the 2.1 version of Prinergy permits in-RIP transparency flattening (not discarding like some competitors!).

However, there are two options in the Refining stage that can create issues for InDesign created jobs. These issues are to do with Prinergy correcting common issues with QuarkXpress generated Composite Postscript (and therefore PDF)

They can be found in the Refine Process Plan section of Prinergy, and specifically inside Color Convert, Overprint Conversion

• Set Colours to Knockout
  Setting process colours to knockout globally is dangerous. It overrides the overprint setting in the input file and forces the colurs to knockout. As a result, colour printing order affects which separations knocks out.

  You would use this feature for disabling overprint and enabling content colour matching for all objects in a PDF page. When you select this feature, you also let the printed PDF page match the onscreen PDF page only when Overprint Preview is turned off.

  Therefore, you are creating a printed result which only matches the onscreen view in Acrobat 4.0 or the Reader. Not InDesign 2.0 or Acrobat 5.0 with Overprint Preview turned on, or more importantly, as the RIP that you created proofs from probably proofed the job!

  As I understand it, this is turned on in Prinergy to “clean up bad Postscript” eminating from QuarkXpress in Composite style workflows. I am willing to hear other issues it solves.
  

  One of the very significant impacts of this is in CMYK+Spot colour PDF workflows with PDF 1.3 files. (ref: InDesign 2.0: Spot Colors, Transparency) InDesign’s flattener creates white process-only-knockout boxes where a spot colour needs to print. You may notice these boxes when viewing the PDF in the Reader or Acrobat without Overprint Preview. When this option is turned on, the spot plates will be knocked out by these boxes, and the resulting plates are not printable.

  Another impact is with Composite, Trapped PDFs. ((ref: InDesign 2.0: Generating Composite, Trapped PDFs)
  The trapping created by the referred technique are discarded when this option is turned on.

• Set Black to Overprint
  All Black elements (where the ink settings are 100%K, 0 CMY) are converted into overprinted black.

My recommendation is to be very, very careful with these options when working with InDesign 2.0 created PDFs with Prinergy

Visit the new InDesign Prepress Section: Adobe InDesign: Prepress Techniques

InDesign: Use the Distiller or Export PDFs?

This was originally posted to the InDesign-Blueworld mailing list on 14-October-2002

Firstly, there is nothing technically wrong with Exported PDFs from InDesign. At all. I (personally) have had great success with exported PDFs from InDesign RIPping to Prinergy and various other imagesetters/platesetters in production in the field.

When you send, or you have received an Acrobat 5.0/PDF 1.4 – directly exported from InDesign 2.0, the workflow choices are a little different: Printing Acrobat 5.0/PDF1.4 Generated by Adobe InDesign 2.0

In either workflow, you will get a high quality PDF that will generate great output.

However, I do recommend using a Print to Postscript-Distill workflow in the following situations:

1. When you are sending a PDF “blind”.

   In other words, where you are not sure of the provenance/age/version/vendor of your printer’s RIP — they will more than likely have determined an internal workflow for Distiller-made PDFs. They will have .joboptions available for your use, and have tested Distiller made PDFs from QuarkXpress, InDesign and other sources. If they use tools like Pitstop, they probably have created preflight checks based on Distiller-made PDFs.

   This is especially the case if you are sending advertisements, sending files to remote countries or doing work for a client where your client nominates a printer and it is not your choice. In these style workflows, there is a blind handoff.

   Therefore, Creating Postscript and Distilling is the safest path.

2. Your Printer’s RIPs are Harlequin < 5.3

   This is the CID font encoding issue. As you probably know by now, InDesign to accurately represent glyphs like ligatures, InDesign encodes the text in its PDFs in a form known as “CID”.

   THERE IS NOTHING WRONG, TRICKY, HIDDEN OR EVIL about CID font encoding. It’s a valid part of the PDF specification that certain vendors had not implemented in their software. By Print to Postscript-Distill, there is no CID font encoding, whereas exported PDFs do. Well build (that is: to
   specification) RIPs/Imagesetters work successfully with CID font encoding.

   A large InDesign customer here in Australia have a *very* old Harlequin RIP which is integral in their workflow. This forces the Distiller-route PDF generation: which works flawlessly, day in and day out.

   Again, if you do not worry, understand or even care what your printer is
   using: the Distiller is a common standard method.

3. Your printer/publisher is conservative, and provides a Distiller-workflow option.

   OK, so your printer accepts PDFs and provides a series of steps and a Distiller 4/5 .joboptions file. In this case, I sometimes recommend people export a PDF from InDesign to see if it works successfully (prepare to be surprised!) — however, to make life easier and have less Prepress technical people getting hot under the collar, use the Print to Postscript-Distill route.

All of this said, Exporting PDFs is a better option. Why?

1. Its quicker. Much quicker.
2. There are less translations (InDesign->Postscript->PDF, vs.
   InDesign->PDF)
3. Once there are more RIPs with InRIP flattening (next revision of Prinergy, Fujifilm etc) are out there, we get even faster output to Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4). A sight to behold, people!

Therefore, if you have the chance to test Exported PDFs with your
workflow, please do.

Please note that Australia is far, far along the High Quality PDF path. PDF is the industry standard here in Australia (independent study) with a majority of printers getting a majority of their work in as PDF. This involves a plethora of RIPs, workflow software, imposition tools etc. Therefore in Australia, Distiller is a consistent known entity, and why we pragmatically recommend Print to Distiller PDF generation for our InDesign customers here.