Category: mungenet

70 Days, 7 Countries

Within the short period of 70 days, I visit at least 7 cities in Asia and Europe. This is a special textlog and imagelog of the experience.

The Cities:

Auckland (23rd March to 25th March)

Auckland Gallery

Florence (18th April to 22nd April)

Florence Gallery

Hong Kong (26th April to 28th April)

Hong Kong Gallery

London (1st April to 10th April, 25th to 26th April)

London Gallery

Normandy (11th April to 17th April)

Normandy Gallery

Normandy Panorama Galleries

Rome (22nd April to 25th April)

Rome Gallery

Singapore (8th March to 12th March)

Singapore Gallery

Tokyo (9th May to 16th May)

Tokyo Gallery

Venice (15th April to 18th April)

Venice Gallery

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.

Los Angeles (14th June to 16th June)

Saturday, 18th June, 2005

We miss the experience of earthquakes and the tsunami warnings.

So ends my 21st visit to the good ole US of A. What surprises me most about this visit is the lack of “culture shock” that I certainly experienced on my first visit in September 1989. Whilst it is still pleasing to hear Aussie accents in your travels in the US, either the cultural invasion of the US into Australia, or my working in a US company has softened the experience. The world has also shrunken in the last 16 years: information travels the world quicker; certainly electrons move more rapidly than atoms – resulting in a compression of cultures.

14 and a half hour flight, QF12, arriving in Sydney along with an amber sunrise in Sydney. The experience of an intensive AQIS search (hand search through our ever self-replicating bags) results in one infraction of the strict Quarantine. We dodge the bullet and take the verbal reprimand.

Sometimes, its good to get home. Unpack, and mount the new fridge magnets.

Thursday, 16th June, 2005

It was only a few short weeks ago that we were in Tokyo, and I commented on the weirdness of the town. Many of the experiences are compounded by “lost in translation”; LA does not have this excuse. Its just weird.

Damian taught us the skills of retail sales; we visited the slowly decaying Santa Monica Plaza/Mall; and visited the up-and-coming Santa Monica Promendade (Adelaidians would call this a Mall…). Brand names worth their mettle all have stores along this strip; and we’ve arrived at peak discount time just prior to the US summer holiday season. Jeans, shirts and other items are all hoarded for expatriation to Australia.

Eating at one of our favourite higher-class fast food diners, ihop; I have a salad. I am sure that even the salad had fat in it! This place is a carb and fat factory. Missing the fres fruits of Mexico.

Choice is the name of the retail game. At the Drug Store, there are at least 5 types of Excedrin; an acetometaphin based headache tablet. The active ingredients are all basically the same – just the labelling is different to suit different headache circumstances: migraine or colds. It goes to show one modern method of retail marketing that is not widely used in Australia at the moment. I think we’d see through it.

Thursday we spent largely at the Beverly Center. This is on La Cienega and is another mall. Remember, this part of the trip is not tourist-y! Japan is often sited as an excellent location for shopping. Many have to learn from the US. More brand-name stores, more choice all within easy reach. We experience the massaging chairs and tempur bed in Brookstone and try on every pair of sunglasses in the joint.

Its been two days in LA. The Hodge’s came, saw and damaged both the credit card and Qantas baggage allowance. We left AU with 24.3kgs. We’re coming back with 46.2kgs. And that is just checked in bags. Avril has broken at least 4 fundamental laws of physics to acheive a packing result. I have been refrained from speaking of the purchase of two new bags in LA to assist in our venture.

Gazumpped someone with my Platinum card on a status points and freaky flyer point upgrade to business class each. This is required looking at the carry on baggage vs. allowance on QF12 to Sydney. These seats are the perfect topping to a most relaxing set of days half way around the world.

Tuesday, 14th June, 2005

Avril remembers her Wiltshire, La Cienega and Sepulvedas; ignores the persistant, wrong and nagging Neverlost and self-navigates us all to Santa Monica and back to West Hollywood. Upon taking Paul Stephens to Santa Monica, we decide that this is our first stop tomorrow.

Avril was last in LA about 8 years ago, and notices that Wiltshire’s shopping has “gentrified” from Santa Monica into Century City. Its amazing the range of stores that follow this road.

The aim of this 2 day sojourn in LA is to buy things that are either expensive in Australia, or where you get limited choice. We hit the Drug Stores (don’t think Corby drugs, think Australian pharmacy but the size of a Coles or Woolies!) to buy up different items (lactaid, excedrin and bounce fabric softener sheets for the dryer).

InDesign Prepress: Photoshop with Vector and Spots, InDesign and Composite PDF

InDesign 2.0 and CS have extensive support for spot/special colours, including InDesign CS’s support for recomposing preseparated DCS format.

DCS was invented to permit applications such as Photoshop to create a pre-separated file and place into QuarkXpress. Quark then didn’t need much intelligence to output the separated file: it just passed each of the plates as an EPS in the page stream when generating film/plates.

In a world where composite PDF is the norm, this DCS workflow no longer fits. With simple CMYK work from Photoshop, placing elements and generating separations is simple. The graphic is still held as separate plates, but presents to the user as a composite image.

The problem arises, however, when attempting to take a CMYK+spot(s) file from Photoshop and attempt place into any application – including InDesign 2.0/CS. Ultimately, it would be great to be able to place a single file that contains bitmap and vector information, as well as holding transparency and spot colours. Presently, the only file format that supports this fully is DCS. Whilst you can create Illustrator 10 .ai or .pdf files containing CMYK bitmap and spot colour vector objects, Photoshop is still largely the tool of choice for creation of special effects.

Photoshop allows spot colour channels to be created, but the only supported output formats are EPS, DCS and Photoshop PDF. In all of these formats, any transparency is not retained.

Therefore, this technique (which has been used many times in production) may assist you in combining the power of Photoshop and extending its spot channel support, and the power of transparency in InDesign to assist us in creating a printable job.

The process:

The overview is: create two Photoshop PDF files, place them on top of each other in InDesign 2.0. The bottom-most file is a CMYK only Photoshop PDF, and the topper-most file is a Spot-only Photoshop PDF. This technique relies on the Transparency Flattener in InDesign 2.0 to weave its magic to generate a composite output.

Step 1: create the source graphic element in Photoshop. In this example, we have a masthead that contains a Bevel & Emboss Photoshop layer style. Our goal is to make the colour of the masthead a special colour. (in the realworld example, this was printed as a metallic silver colour). Don’t create the spot channel yet. Save it as a Photoshop PDF (retaining transparency, vector information and resulting in a compact file).

In this file, the text has a white (or knockout) colour. Its goal in life is to act like a “cookie cutter” and remove the ink from underlying elements at print time. The Bevel & Emboss effect is created using a Black ink, so it will still appear on the black plate at print time.

[1202] sd-1.jpg

Step 2: Take the same Photoshop PDF file:

  • Turn off any effects.
  • Change the white/knockout colour to Black. Choose a % of black that equals the % of spot colour ink you would like. In this example, as the element is a vector text element, it is just filled with 100% Black.
  • double check and ensure where you have black, you want the spot ink to appear
  • Mode>Convert>Grayscale. The will convert the black elements to 100% Black.
  • Mode>Convert>Duotone. This will then permit you to change the Black to a named spot channel. Thankfully in Photoshop 6 or 7, this will be clipped inside the vector text element.
  • For Advanced Users: you can also use other Layer Styles in Photoshop to ‘feather off’ the spot ink to create a highlight effect.

Do not make any position changes to the file. Set the channel in the Duotone to the same spot ink you are going to use in InDesign. This can be “Ink Aliased” at output time.

[1203] sd-2.jpg

Step 3: As you will notice, saving as an EPS or PDF – transparency is not retained in this process. Don’t panic, we’re going to fix this in InDesign.

So we have two files: one being the Composite CMYK object saved as a Photoshop PDF, and another saved as a Photoshop PDF containing a Spot colour. In both files, there is vector data ensuring high quality output. In this example, I am using the .PDP file extension: the data inside the Photoshop PDF file is exactly the same; all I have done is adjust the extension. This will enable InDesign to Edit Original into Photoshop automatically.

[1204] sd-3.jpg

Step 4: Go to InDesign 2.0. Place the file saved in step 1.

[1205] sd-4.jpg

Step 5: Place the file saved in step 3, positioning it exactly over the top of the file placed in step 4. Use the transform palette to get 100% placement accuracy. Don’t worry about the “white” (knockout) colour from the placed file.

[1206] sd-5.jpg

Step 6: set the top object to 100% Multiply using Window>Transparency. Almost magically, the white colour is removed, yet the spot colour remains. Leaving this at 100% Multiply, at output time the spot colour is retained (not converted to process)

[1207] sd-6.jpg

To make the printing process a little more difficult, here the layer which the two elements are placed onto have been moved behind the image.

[1208] sd-6a.jpg

Step 7: Export as PDF, or Print to the Acrobat Distiller. In this example, I printed using Composite CMYK. Its a little difficult to fathom; but spot colours are held in this process (unless you use InDesign 2.0/CS’s Ink Manager to convert them back to process at print time)

[1209] sd-7.jpg

In the above screen dump, I am using Quite Revealing to show the background colour from the Composite PDF. As you can see, the first placed CMYK PDF ‘cuts out’ the colour in the background: in this instance, the PANTONE 264C Spot Colour.

[1210] sd-8.jpg

This above screen dump shows the PANTONE 340 C as created in the second Photoshop file

[1211] sd-9.jpg

Here is the black plate. The Bevel&Emboss added in the first Photoshop PDF is retained, and overprints the spot colour correctly.

How does this work?

The first file you place (CMYK) element acts like a ‘knockout’ element, removing any items underneath. The second file placed (EPS Spot) then overprints the underlying CMYK object. As InDesign’s flattener is smart, it does not knockout underlying elements. It also does not change their colour in the flattening as the top object is a spot colour. Other blend modes such as Lighten or Darken do attempt to change the colours – so the final document may be forced into CMYK.

What’s the Benefit?

What does this provide that DCS does not? The ability to generate a composite PDF. As soon as you place a DCS file into QuarkXpress, InDesign or PageMaker – you are forcing the output to be separations. In modern Postscript 3 or Extreme workflows, recombining preseparated output is difficult, and not the default workflow.

[1222] example of front cover of June 2002 Foxtel

If you are in Australia, you may have seen the June 2002 issue of the Foxtel magazine. It used this technique. Supplied as a composite PDF with Spot colour, it correctly separated, was trapped and printed as a metallic. The Bevel & Emboss in the K plate overprinted the silver-metallic special colour. This plate is still a vector element.

Thanks to: Matt Phillips, Ben Hewitt (who tested this out on a live job!) and Alan Rosenfeld (for listening to my ranting about this in Brisbane). A big thankyou to Aaron Cliff from Foxtel magazine for sending a better quality image – and more importantly, being brave enough to pioneer this technique.

Illustrator 10

Adobe Illustrator 10.x – Illustrator 10.x: Clipping vs. Opacity masks
Cari Jansen
How can we put an image inside text? Cari explains how…

Adobe Illustrator 10.x – using appearance & styles to make a simple roadmap
Cari Jansen
Remember the days when we used to create roadmaps, using zillions of paths with various stroke weights and colours.

Illustrator 10: Making Good Text Go Bad
Nick Hodge
Using Illustrators transparency features to make text look bad

Scripting Spot Colour Changes in Illustrator 10
Nick Hodge
Scripting Spot Colour Changes in Illustrator 10

Warping Text using Illustrator 10’s Warping Tools
Nick Hodge
Using Illustrator’s Warping Tools on Text