InDesign Prepress: Export or Distill PDFs?

InDesign: Use the Distiller or Export PDFs?

The original of this was 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 or Acrobat 6.0/PDF 1.5 – directly exported from InDesign 2.0/CS, 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.