Nick Hodge's Blog

Well, this special event is in the past. If you would like to see it on again, please email me!

The leading graphics applications are also leaders in automation. Learn how scripting Adobe applications can save you huge amounts of time and money, and create more customised solutions that pay for themselves quickly.

Venue:
Adobe Systems
Level 4, 67 Albert Avenue
Chatswood, NSW 2067.

Hosted by Nick Hodge, Adobe Systems
Presented by Shane Stanley, Myriad Communications

Dates:
Wednesday, 21st August 2002
Thursday, 22nd August 2002

Times:
Registration 8:30am
Lunch 1:00pm
Finish 5:00pm

Topics:

Wednesday: Scripting InDesign day: Creating and modifying documents, placing and manipulating pictures and text, dealing with picture links, page items, colors, tables, inlines, styles and fonts, printing, exporting PDFs, using libraries and creating hyperlinks.

Thursday: Scripting Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat: Photoshop: opening and saving/exporting in different formats, adjusting and filtering, and using javascript with the Action Manger. Illustrator: creating documents, dealing with layers and paths, working with colors, importing and exporting. Plus a session on integration: bringing it all together in workflows.

Cost:
Free

Registration Process:
Email Nick Hodge

Requirements:

• Knowledge of AppleScript. If you need a refresher, or to learn AppleScript, Shane is running a fee-based course on Tuesday 20th August.
• If you can bring a PowerBook, please do. We’ll ensure you get at least the 30-day trial version of the software installed.

What about Windows?
If you are interested in learning how to script using VBScript, please contact Nick so we can guage interest. This course is AppleScript-based, intensive and exclusive.

Have you received an InDesign 2.0 document and are not sure of its heritage? Maybe there is something that just doesn’t seem right, and before going off the deep end – you need to confirm your suspicions.

Here’s how to check:

• MacOS: hold down the Command (Apple) key, and go to the Apple menu, “About InDesign” (MacOS X: it’s under the “InDesign” menu)
• Windows: hold down the Control key, and go to Help>About InDesign

A dialog box will appear that displays indepth, support information related to the topmost document.

As you can see in the above screen dump, this document started life out as a QuarkXpress 3.32 document. Knowing this, you may be able to double check for text wrap issues, font missing problems and any left over ‘bits’ that may have accumulated in the Xpress document over time.

Whilst this is in InDesign mainly for support reasons, I happened to have accidently found this menu when noodling around InDesign for “easter eggs”. Thankfully this is no zapping alien. It is way more useful than that!

Thanks to Cari Jansen for assisting/clarifying me on this one!

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

A question: what is the difference between these output formats when printing from InDesign? I must admit, its something I wasn’t too clear on. So I decided to hunt down a definitive answer by doing some intensive testing.

Let’s start with an InDesign 2.0 document that contains many elements and see what changes at print time. There are three panels: all of the elements within these panels are defined in the colour space CMYK, RGB or Spot colour. The Placed PSD is a normal Photoshop 7 .PSD file; the four rectangles are created in InDesign and the placed EPS is saved as an Illustrator 8 EPS from Illustrator 10.

Printing from InDesign 2.0 using Composite RGB results in all InDesign created elements and placed bitmaps being converted to RGB. Placed EPS or PDF elements stay in their placed colour mode (RGB or CMYK or god forbid, both). Spot colour elements; either created in InDesign 2.0 or placed stay as spot colour elements.

Printing from InDesign 2.0 using Composite CMYK results is virtually the as the above: all InDesign created elements and placed bitmaps being converted to CMYK. Placed EPS or PDF elements stay in their placed colour mode (RGB or CMYK or god forbid, both). Spot colour elements; either created in InDesign 2.0 or placed stay as spot colour elements.

This conversion is triggered from the document colourspaces. You will notice a different if you turn on colour management, or assign profiles to bitmaps in the InDesign document.

A little Transparency Flattener Magic

In the above example, this is the resulting PDF when printing Composite Gray, but with placed PDF or EPS elements. They are not converted to Grayscale. So, here’s our little technique with transparency applied.

The Flattener is your colourspace conversion friend. If you take a placed EPS or PDF element that you are not sure in CMYK or RGB, just set its transparency to 99.9% Normal. Now when printing, this element is routed through the magic of the Flattener prior to output. It sees that your are printing “Composite CMYK” or “Composite RGB” and converts the output to that colourspace. The next question is “what happens, doesn’t this make it see through? Won’t it blend with the colours underneath?” Well, no. 0.1% is a VERY small percentage, and it rounds back to a full number (evidently, some stuff is represented as integers, so 0.1% of 255 is a 254.75, which rounds back up to 255)

You can also use this to force a document into Grayscale. Setting placed EPS/PDF elements with 99.9% transparency and printing Composite Gray results in a 100% Grayscale PDF [watch for spots!]. Good for Newsprint applications. Be warned; the grayscale colours chosen might not always be what you want at print time.

What about exporting EPS or PDF?

Yes, this same process applies.

EPS: you have a choice of CMYK, Gray or RGB. The flattener trick with 99.9% transparency works here too, as elements have to be flattened in the Postscript stream.

PDF: you have a choice of CMYK, RGB or Leave Unchanged. Again, the flattener is invoked where required.

What is the Difference Between InRIP Separations and Composite CMYK?

When printing InRIP separations you are printing Composite CMYK (as above), but InDesign adds some extra Postscript commands to the output device. This instructs the RIP to generate a page per colourant in the file. So, if there is spot colour in the document, it will be separated onto its own plate.

By the way, Acrobat Distiller 4 and 5 ignores this “separate” command, and you get a PDF from the Postscript that is the same as a Composite CMYK PDF. Except that InDesign gets a chance to apply “Application Built-in” trapping prior to creating the Postscript. (ref: InDesign 2.0: Generating Composite, Trapped PDFs)

Different RIPs have different settings for line screen ruling/angles — and in some cases override what the application outputs. Usually because “the application gets it wrong” according to prepress operators I speak to.

What is the Difference Between the two Transparency Blend Spaces?

When Flattening two objects at print time, you’ve got to do some mathematical stuff to determine how colours will mix together. The colourspace this is executed in may change the effective colour of the resulting flattened object. This is similar to the difference you see in Photoshop with some blend modes in RGB vs. CMYK. The recommendation is to set this to CMYK for printed output, and RGB when doing on-screen Acrobat 4.0 style PDFs. Acrobat 5.0 PDFs are not flattened at export time. You can also see a subtle change on screen in InDesign 2.0.

(my testing procedure: Printing from InDesign 2.0.1 through Acrobat Distiller 5.0.5 using the Press.joboptions [leave colour unchanged] and checking colours in the resulting PDF using PitStop 5.0)