Printing Acrobat 5.0/PDF1.4 Generated by Adobe InDesign 2.0

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

Adobe InDesign 2.0 has a feature permitting direct export of Adobe PDF. There have been some designers who have been confused about which version of PDF to send, and why their printers/receivers cannot output a quality result. The idea of this note is to clarify some of the workflow points, and ensure high quality output.

Rather than creating (or printing) to Postscript and using the Acrobat Distiller to make a PDF, the direct export of PDF uses a piece of technology called the PDFLibrary to construct the PDF.

This PDF is no lesser PDF than one created by the Postscript>Distiller method. The differences are noted here: InDesign 2.0: Export or Distill PDFs?

In InDesign 2.0, there are two major revisions of PDF you can export: Acrobat 4.0 (equal to PDF 1.3) and Acrobat 5.0 (equal to PDF 1.4). With each release of Acrobat, Adobe has been adding features to the file format. These features are exploited by InDesign when direct exporting. The graphics operators used in applications such as QuarkXpress and InDesign 1.5 are simple, and can be expressed in PDF 1.3.

Viewing these PDF 1.4 files inside the latest Reader you should not notice any major differences. Inside, however, there is a whole world of difference that dictate how you should output the files.

Please note: not all Acrobat 5.0/PDF 1.4 files you receive will have transparency. With Distiller 5 or 6, using a Print to Postscript and Distill workflow, it is possible to create a PDF1.4 that does not contain transparency. To check for transparency, run the PDF through Pitstop or Acrobat 6.0’s Preflighting tools.

When exporting as an Acrobat 4.0/PDF 1.3, all of the transparency inside the InDesign file is flattened using the Transparency Flattener. This PDF is openable in Acrobat 4.05 or later, and will print/RIP on any Postscript Level 2 or later device.

Exporting as an Acrobat 5.0/PDF 1.4 results in a very different PDF. The transparency remains unflattened. This relies on another process flattening the transparency.

How can you tell?

Open the PDF in Acrobat, and go to File>Document>Document Summary

In the above screen dump there are three key pieces of information:

• Application is InDesign 2.0.x. High likelihood of transparency. Also look for Illustrator 9.0.x or 10.0.x
• PDF Producer is Adobe PDF Library 5.0, indicating a direct export of PDF. High likelihood of transparency/
• PDF version is 1.4, also an indicator of transparency will be contained in the PDF.

How do you produce a quality print result?

Option 1:

Place PDF into InDesign 2.0, and print to Postscript. This will use InDesign’s Transparency Flattener to create a Postscript Level 2/3 file.

Placing multiple-page PDFs into InDesign 2.0 can be time consuming. There are two scripts here that may assist: PDF multipage import
(Win), PDF multipage import (MacOS X) and PDF multipage import (MacOS)

From InDesign 2.0, print the document containing the PDFs to your output device. You can also use this method to Print to Postscript and re-Distill the PDF, or using InDesign 2.0: Printing Output Choices and Flattener Tricks (including force Greyscale export!), change the colour space at output time.

Option 2:

Print from Acrobat 6.0. Why not 5.0? The Transparency Flattener in Acrobat 5.0 and Illustrator 9.0 is “an older generation” – and may not produce the same quality result as InDesign 2.0.

The above illustrates what appears under the Advanced button in Acrobat 6.0’s Print… dialog box. Here, you can set the Transparency Flattener settings in a similar way to InDesign 2.0.

More information about Acrobat 6.0 is here: Acrobat 6.0 Professional: Graphics, Print, Prepress Overview

Option 3:

RIP the PDF on a device that truly supports PDF 1.4. Devices such as Creo Prinergy 2.1 support PDF 1.4 files and flatten the InDesign created transparency as a part of the normalisation process. Other RIPs such as the Fujifilm Celebrant Extreme RIP support PDF 1.4 in a similar way.

Some device manufacturers claim they support Acrobat 5.0/PDF 1.4 files. This may be the case, but the key question is “does it flatten transparency in the RIP?” Some devices will discard the transparency, resulting in a print job that is vastly different to the InDesign file.

What Not to Do:

Many customers email me asking about placing InDesign EPS files into QuarkXpress 4.x or 5 , and using tools like Imposition (an Xpress plugin) to impose InDesign jobs. There are many reasons why this is an outdated workflow. Ignoring InDesign for a moment, what happens when you receive a QuarkXpress 6.0 file? Life is going to get difficult very quickly. Time to move to true PDF based imposition environment. Squeezing all the PDFs you receive back through QuarkXpress is just asking for trouble.

• Do Not Open in Acrobat 5.0, save as EPS and place into QuarkXpress, any version. This is largely the same as Printing as Postscript from Acrobat 5.0.
• Do Not Place the PDF into QuarkXpress as a PDF. QuarkXpress’s engine for opening and placing PDFs only works with Acrobat 3.0/PDF 1.2 files, nothing later. For instance, spot colours that may be in the PDF are not recognised.
• Do Not Open the PDF in Illustrator, any version, and attempt to print. Illustrator is not a universal PDF editing application.
• Do Not Place the PDF in InDesign 1.5. This version of InDesign does not have a transparency flattener, and therefore a quality result cannot be obtained.
• Do Not Open and convert the PDF in Photoshop, any version. Photoshop will rasterise the PDF into pixels. Even at 300dpi, this will result in a very large file and any vector graphics and text will “go fuzzy” at print time as it is passed through a halftone screen at the RIP-end.

If you are sending directly exported Acrobat 5.0 PDFs from InDesign 2.0, send this web page to your printer.

Thanks to Marcus for ensuring I got off my bum and wrote this article.