Category: indesign

Printing PDF 1.4 from InDesign 2.0

Printing Acrobat 5.0/PDF1.4 Generated by Adobe InDesign 2.0. Sorry about the duration between notes here. Busy doing other, non technical stuff.

Turkey wins Eurovision 2003: On the British zero point score: “But others were less charitable, citing Jemini’s off-key performance, tacky costumes and inane lyrics.” So why did anyone score points at all? In fact, why are Iceland and Israel in the competition. They are not in Europe! In fact, isn’t Turkey barely a European country? Go Estonia

InDesign: Duotones into InDesign

This has been in my head for a while: InDesign 2.0: Photoshop, Duotones into InDesign

In my time I have seen various ‘complaints’ that Adobe does not publish the specifications for the PDF (Portable Document Format) in a timely fashion – thereby gaining market advantage. Well, the Draft PDF Reference, Version 1.5 is available before Acrobat 6.0 ships! Whilst this is a Draft version, and subject to change, it does go to show that we are a friendlier company than some people claim.

Now, at 1107 pages in length – its not going to be a read for all of us!

InDesign 2.0 Prepress Issue

Another interesting InDesign 2.0 discovery this week. I’ll write up a document about this once I get my head around the implications – and can create some relevant screen dumps.

Many RIPs (and not just older RIPs) have significant performance issues with images that are rotated, scaled (especially in different % in X and Y dimensions) and cropped into small clipping paths. RIPs have some intensive mathematical transformations to output these images to plates/film at very high resolution (2400dpi/133lpi) – taking inordinate amounts of time to generate separations. Normally, the workflow is to ensure that all images placed into your layout are pre-rotated and scaled. With InDesign, by forcing an early change such as this you are losing the benefits of flexible, late-stage editing workflow. However, how do you solve the RIP time issue?

What I (and Matt) found is another “side effect” of the transparency flattener. Prior to applying a transparency effect, it pre-rotates, scales and clips images at print/export PDF time. Therefore, we can use the special “set the frame to 99.9% Normal transparency” technique to force an image through the flattener without changing the underlying image. (ref: InDesign 2.0: Printing Output Choices and Flattener Tricks (including force Greyscale export!)) It is important to apply the transparency on the frame. Where this really works well is in extremely large images.

The end result is a smaller file, that RIPs extremely fast. Contrary to popular belief – transparency can significantly improve RIP time.

Adobe Tips

As promised, I am starting to document the techniques shown at the recent Adobe roadshows

Illustrator 10: Illustrator 10: Making Good Text Go Bad. Photoshop 7: Photoshop 7 File Browser Automatic Numbering Technique

Apart from writing the above articles, I decided to noodle around with the GD library that is a part of PHP4. GD permits the dynamic changing of images programmatically, rather than having to do it by hand in an image editing tool. In my example, the code is grabbing a random Neil Finn lyric from the Random Neil Finn Lyric Server. The end result looks like this:

http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordsimageengine.php

The text is gathered from a SOAP stream, and composited on top of another dynamically served image.

OK, I have another confession. I absolutely cannot miss an episode of Meet the Osbournes. Its partly the fact that this dysfunctional family seems to work, a Simpsons in real life. Ozzy, obviously suffering from too many non-natural substances in too great quantity, is really a pussy cat. This persona belies his 30-plus years of a proto-high priest of the dark side. The irony of seeing Ozzy go bananas over his noisy neighbours is delicious. What a riot.