Choosing In-RIP Separations from the Color pop-up menu instructs InDesign to create a special type of composite CMYK file that will only print properly on a PostScript 3 output device an
Trang 1software on another machine However, in most of these instances,
it makes more sense to create a PDF file, a device-independent PostScript file, or—for the adventurous—a device-dependent PostScript file using In-RIP separations, especially if you are using trapping (trapping is not supported in CMYK composite output) Choosing In-RIP Separations from the Color pop-up menu instructs InDesign to create a special type of composite CMYK file that will only print properly on a PostScript 3 output device and some newer PostScript Level 2 devices
To tell InDesign to send the composite color information to the printer without changing it, choose Composite Leave Unchanged
If you do this, you will not be able to use the Simulate Overprint option
You can also tell InDesign to separate each of your pages into four plates (or more, in the case of spot colors) by choosing Separations from the Color pop-up menu If you select the Separations or In-RIP Separations option, InDesign activates the Inks list and its associated controls (the Flip, Frequency, Angle, Trapping settings, and so on)
One problem with printing proofs on a desktop laser printer is that it’s sometimes difficult to read colored text because it appears as a tint Similarly, when you want to fax a black-and-white version of your document, screened text becomes almost unreadable When you turn on the Text as Black check box, InDesign ensures all your text appears as solid black—except for text that is already set to solid white, Paper color, or None
Text As Black
Figure 11-5 The Output Panel
of the Print Dialog Box
Trang 2The Trapping pop-up menu controls whether InDesign applies matic trapping to your documents Choose one of the following trap-ping options from the Trapping pop-up menu:
auto-▶ Off Use this option if you’ve done all of your trapping manually
(using InDesign’s fills and strokes) or if you plan to separate and trap the publication using a post-processing program
▶ Application Built-In Choose Application Built-In when you
want InDesign to trap your publication as it’s sent to the printer (or to disk)
▶ Adobe In-RIP Select this option when you want to leave
trap-ping up to the RIP in your printer or imagesetter This feature, which makes us rather nervous, only works on PostScript 3 and some PostScript Level 2 printers
We cover trapping in a bit more detail in Chapter 10, “Color.”
InDesign can mirror pages at print time if you choose Horizontal, Vertical, or Horizontal & Vertical from the Flip pop-up menu Flip-ping an image is used for creating either wrong- or right-reading film from imagesetters, or film with emulsion side up or down This is often handled in the imagesetter or platesetter, so be careful before you go changing this setting The same thing goes for the Negative check box, which inverts the entire page so that everything that is set
to 100-percent black becomes zero-percent black (effectively white) Never make assumptions about what your output provider wants; what you think will help might actually hinder (and cost you money
in the long run)
What halftone screen frequency (in lines per inch) and screen angle
do you want to use to print your publication? If you selected posite Gray in the Color pop-up menu, you can choose either the printer’s default (which is defined by the PPD you selected) or you can choose Custom and then enter your own values in the Frequency and Angle fields
Com-When you’re printing separations, you’ll see more choices on the Screening pop-up menu, and the values shown in the Frequency and Angle fields change as you select inks in the Inks list Where the heck are these choices and values coming from? They’re coming from the PPD Every PPD contains a list of screen frequencies and screen angles optimized to avoid moiré patterns on the specific PostScript device described by the PPD Because of the way that PostScript halftoning
Trapping
Flip and Negative
Screening
Trang 3(or any digital halftoning, for that matter) works, a PostScript RIP cannot perfectly “hit” just any halftone screen
On PostScript Level 1 devices, the screen angle and screen quency you’d get would sometimes fail to match the frequency and angle you specified This often resulted in serious output problems and severe moiré patterns PPDs list combinations of screen angles known to be safe for a given printer at a screen frequency and angle.While the need for these optimized screen angles has diminished somewhat with newer versions of PostScript, we strongly advise you
fre-to stick with them when you’re printing separations
To override the optimized screen settings for an ink, select the ink in the Inks list and then enter new values in the Frequency and Angle fields Again, we don’t recommend this, but you might have a very good reason for doing so that we simply haven’t thought of yet (like perhaps you’ve lost your mind)
The optimized screen angles only cover the process inks, however When your publication includes spot inks, InDesign sets the screen angle of every spot ink to 45 degrees
For spot-color work—especially where you’re overlaying tints of two spot colors or using duotones from Photoshop based on two spot inks—you need to specify the screen angles appropriately Here’s how to set them
▶ If the spot inks never interact, set the screen angle for the inks to
45 degrees (because a 45-degree halftone screen is the least ous to the eye)
obvi-▶ If you’re creating lots of two-ink tint builds, or using duotones, you have a few choices, and two (somewhat contradictory) goals You want both colors to print as close as possible to 45 degrees (especially the dominant, or darker, color), and you want as much separation between the angles as possible (the greater the separation between angles—45 is the maximum possible—the less patterning will be visible where the screens interact) Table 11-2 lists some options
▶ If you’re printing with two spot inks and the spot colors don’t overprint any process inks, use the default screen angles for Magenta and Cyan from the optimized screen you’ve selected
Note that even if you set specific screen frequencies and angles for every color, you may not get what you ask for Most imagesetters and platesetters these days strip out all screening settings and replace them with their own unless you (or your output provider) turns off this process We’ve been caught by this several times, when we’ve
Trang 4chosen low-frequency screens in order to create a special effect, only
to find our instructions ignored and the normal 133 lpi halftone appear Very annoying
When you select the Separations option, InDesign activates the Inks list In this list, you’ll see at least the four process inks (yes, they’ll appear even if you aren’t using process colors in your publication), plus any spot inks you’ve defined When you select an ink in the Inks list, InDesign displays the halftone screen properties for that ink in the Frequency and Angle fields (see “Screening,” above)
To tell InDesign not to print an ink, click the printer icon to the left of the ink name in the Inks list You can also turn on or off all the inks by Option/Alt-clicking Don’t worry about inks that aren’t used
in your publication—InDesign will not generate a blank separation for them If, for example, your publication uses only black ink and
a spot ink, InDesign will not create separations for Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow, even though those inks appear in the Inks list
As we discussed in Chapter 10, “Color,” you can set various objects
to overprint using the Attributes panel However, most composite printers (like laser printers and inkjets) don’t support overprinting Fortunately, you can simulate overprinting on these output devices
Inks
Simulate Overprint
Subordinate: Dominant: Notes:
separation, but neither angle is very obvious on its own
printed at zero degrees is a very light color—otherwise, the hori-zontal bands of halftone dots will
be too obvious
angles are more obvious than 45 degrees, but less obvious than 0, and you get the full 45-degree separation to avoid patterning
slightly less obvious than the subordinate screen Full 45-degree separation
Table 11-2 Screen Angles for Spot Color Work
Trang 5by turning on the Simulate Overprint check box Because this can change color definitions (spot colors get converted to process, for
example), you don’t want to turn this on for anything other than
proofing your files on composite printers
The Ink Manager manages how colors trap with each other and how spot colors interact (for instance, you can use the Ink Manager to alias one spot color to another) We cover the Ink Manager in Chap-ter 10, “Color.”
Graphics
The options in the Graphics pane control the way that InDesign prints the fonts and graphics in your publication (see Figure 11-6)
The Send Data pop-up menu affects what InDesign does with bitmaps
in TIFF, JPEG, and other explicitly bitmapped file formats It has no effect on images inside imported EPS or PDF graphics
Do you want to print that 30-megabyte color scan every time you proof a document on your laser printer? Probably not The Send Data pop-up menu gives you four options to control what InDesign does with images when you print: All, Optimized Subsampling, Proxy, and None, each of which is described below
All Use this option when you want InDesign to send all of the image
data from the image file to the printer We recommend that you always use this option when printing the final copies of your pages
Optimized Subsampling This option tells InDesign to only send
as much information from the image as is necessary to produce the best quality on the given output device using the current settings It reduces the amount of data that has to be passed over the network and imaged by the printer It can speed up printing immensely
How InDesign pares down the data depends on whether the image is color/grayscale or black and white
▶ Color/Grayscale images As we mentioned in Chapter 7,
“Importing and Exporting,” there’s no reason for the resolution
of grayscale and color images (in pixels per inch) to exceed two times the halftone screen frequency (in lines per inch) When you choose Optimized Subsampling from the Send Data pop-up menu, InDesign reduces the resolution of grayscale and color
Ink Manager
Send Data
Trang 6images to match the halftone screen frequency you’ve selected (in the Output pane of the Print dialog box) If you’ve set up a 75-line screen (for instance), InDesign won’t send more than 150 dots per inch of image resolution Note that InDesign does not change the resolution of the images in your publication—it just reduces the amount of data that’s sent to the printer.
▶ Black-and-white (bi-level) images When you’re printing
bi-level, black-and-white images, and have selected Optimized Subsampling from the Send Data pop-up menu, InDesign matches the images it sends to the resolution of the output device So if you’ve got a 600-pixels-per-inch black-and-white TIFF, and you’re printing on a 300-dpi laser printer, InDesign reduces the resolution of the image to 300 pixels per inch before sending it to the printer For those who really want to know, InDesign gets the printer’s resolution from the DefaultResolu-tion keyword in the PPD
The real value of the Optimized setting lies in printing laser proof copies of jobs that are destined for high-resolution (hence high half-tone screen frequency) output If you’re producing a document that will be printed with a 133-lpi screen, for instance, you may be work-ing with images that have resolutions of 250 or even 300 ppi But for proofing on a 600-dpi laser printer (which has a 85-lpi default screen frequency), you only need 106 dpi—maximum By subsampling to
this lower resolution, InDesign is sending less than one fifth of the
information over the wire Obviously, this can save you a lot of time
Figure 11-6 The Graphics Panel
of the Print Dialog Box
Trang 7With high-resolution line art, InDesign might send only a sixteenth
of the data
Printing an image using the Optimized Subsampling option duces a more detailed printed image than using the Low Resolution option, but doesn’t take as long to print or transmit as would the full-resolution version of the image
pro-While Optimized Subsampling might sound like the universal cure for perfect (speedy, high quality) printing, it isn’t Subsampling,
by its nature, blurs and distorts images, especially in areas of high contrast Therefore, we think you should use this option for proof printing, but not for printing the final copies of your pages
Proxy Choose Proxy from the Send Data pop-up menu to have
InDesign send only the low-resolution preview images it displays on your screen to the printer Again, this is an option to use when you’re printing proof copies of your pages, not for final output
None When you choose this option, InDesign prints all of the
imported graphics in your publication as boxes with Xs through them As you’d expect, this makes it print faster Proof printing is great when you’re copy-editing the text of a publication—why wait for the graphics to print?
Note that you can speed things up a bit, without completely nating the graphics, by using the Proxy or Optimized Subsampling option on the Send Data pop-up menu Also, note that you can turn off the printing of a particular type of imported graphic using the Omit EPS/PDF/Bitmap Images options in the Advanced pane of the Print dialog box
elimi-One of the best ways to speed up InDesign’s printing is to manage downloaded fonts sensibly You can save many hours over the course
of a day, week, month, or year by downloading fonts to your printer
in advance, and by understanding the way that InDesign handles font downloading
The basic concept is pretty simple: Fonts can be either “resident” (which means that they’re stored in your printer’s memory or on a hard drive attached to the printer) or “downloadable” (which means they’re stored somewhere on your system or network)
When you print, InDesign checks the printer PPD to see if the fonts are available on the selected printer If the font is available, InDesign sends a reference to the font, but does not send the font itself, which means that the text will be printed in the font available
on the printer
Font Downloading
Trang 8What happens when a font is not available in the printer’s memory
or on its hard drive? That depends on the option you’ve selected in the Fonts section of the Graphics pane of the Print dialog box
When you choose the None option, you’re directing InDesign
to refrain from including any fonts in the PostScript it’s sending to the printer (or to disk) If text in your publication has been format-ted using fonts that are not resident on the printer, that text will be printed using the printer’s default font (usually Courier)
When you choose the Complete option, InDesign checks the state
of the Download PPD Fonts option If this option is on, InDesign sends all of the fonts used in the publication to the printer’s memory
If the option is turned off, InDesign downloads all of the fonts used
in the publication that are not listed in the PPD (PPDs contain lists
of fonts available on a given make and model printer, plus any you’ve added by editing the PPD) InDesign downloads the fonts once for each page that’s printed As you’d expect, this increases the amount
of time it takes to send the job to your printer
To decrease the amount of your printer’s memory that’s taken
up by downloaded fonts, or to decrease the amount of time it takes InDesign to send the fonts to your printer, choose the Subset option When you do this, InDesign sends only those characters required to print the publication This can speed up printing tremendously
At the same time, subsetting fonts can cause problems with some printers If you find that you are losing characters, that the wrong characters print, or that your printer generates a PostScript error when you’re trying to print using the Subset option, use one of the other options If you’re printing a file to disk as PostScript for deliv-ery to a service bureau or to create a PDF using Acrobat Distiller, do not use the Subset option
Adobe would love it if everyone had PostScript 3 or PDF print engine devices Not only would they make money from licensing fees, but their software could also take advantage of all the cool features
in PostScript 3 RIPs However, currently many people only have PostScript Level 2 devices (Please don’t ask us why “PostScript 3” omits the “Level” moniker We can only assume that Adobe’s mar-keting strategists have their reasons.) In most cases, InDesign reads the PostScript version from the PPD, so you don’t have to think about this However, if you’re making a device-independent PostScript file
you will need to choose Level 2 or Level 3 (Here Adobe does use
“Level.”)
Postscript Level
Trang 9The Data Format feature controls how bitmapped images (like TIFF and JPEG) are sent to the printer While sending the information
in ASCII format is more reliable over some older networks, binary
is almost always fine and has the benefit of creating a much smaller PostScript file (the images are half the size of ASCII) We usually use binary unless we’re sending files to an output provider that we know requires ASCII
If (and only if) you’re printing to a non-PostScript/PDF device, your pages need to be rasterized (converted to a bitmap) You can control who does the conversion: If you turn on Print as Bitmap, InDesign rasterizes at a particular image resolution that you specify If you turn it off, InDesign writes vectors to disk and lets the operating system do the conversion In general, it works pretty well either way
When you’re printing through an OPI server, you can direct the server to replace the low-resolution images you’ve used to lay out your document with the high-resolution images you’ve stored on the server To do this, turn off the OPI Image Replacement option and turn on the appropriate Omit for OPI check boxes This omits the images from the PostScript output, leaving only the OPI link infor-mation in their place
Note that you can specify which types of images you want to replace with OPI comments: EPS, PDF, or Bitmap Images When you turn on the EPS option, you’re telling InDesign not to print any EPS graphics in the file, but if PDF and Bitmap Images are still turned off then the program will include that image data at print time
Data Format
Print as Bitmap
OPI Image Replacement
Trang 10Figure 11-7 The Advanced Panel
of the Print Dialog Box
When you turn on OPI Image Replacement, InDesign acts as
an OPI server at print time, replacing the low-resolution OPI proxy images with the high-resolution versions InDesign needs access to the server or drive containing the files for this to work To retain OPI image links to images stored inside imported EPS graphics, make sure that you turn on the Read Embedded OPI Image Links option
in the EPS Import Options dialog box
We hate to give you the runaround, but if you’re reading this hoping
to learn all about how the flattener works, you’re out of luck We cover all the issues regarding printing transparency later in this chapter
We will say, however, that you can use the Transparency Flattener section of the Advanced pane of the Print dialog box to choose a default Flattener setting for your print job, and to tell InDesign whether to ignore any Flattener settings you’ve applied to particular spreads in your document with the Pages panel
Use Medium Resolution when printing proofs and High lution when printing final artwork But “Medium” and “High” can mean different things depending on the Flattener settings, so you still need to go read that other section Sorry
Reso-Summary
The last pane of the Print dialog box, Summary, simply lists all the various settings in all the panes in one long text list It’s darn silly
Transparency Flattener
Trang 11(not to mention difficult and time-consuming) to read through this unformatted list of settings on screen Fortunately, you can click the Save Summary button to save this list to disk as a text file
Print Presets
We don’t know about you, but we find we print a typical InDesign publication (at least) three different ways We print a proof copy on our laser printer, a color proof on a color printer, and then we print our final copies on an platesetter In the first two instances, we print composites; when we print to an imagesetter, we may print color separations You might think that for each type of printing we have
to claw our way through the settings in the Print dialog box Instead,
we save our Print dialog box settings in a print preset—which means
that switching from proof to final printing is as easy as selecting the appropriate print preset
Print presets are like paragraph styles—they’re bundles of butes that can be applied in a single action Almost all of the attri-butes in the Print dialog box and in the printer driver dialog boxes are included in a print preset
attri-It’s easy to create a print preset; set up the Print dialog box with the options the way you want them, click the Save Preset button at the bottom of the dialog box, and then give the preset a name You can then go ahead and print, or just cancel out of the Print dialog box (if you just wanted to set up the preset without printing)
InDesign also has a second method for making print presets, though we find it slightly more cumbersome
1 Choose Define from the Print presets submenu of the File menu InDesign displays the Define Print Presets dialog box (see Figure 11-8)
2 Click the New button InDesign displays the Print dialog box, except with one difference: there’s a Name field at the top
3 Enter a name for the print preset in the Name field, then set
up the dialog box with the settings you want, and click the OK button InDesign returns you to the Define Print Presets dialog box and adds the new print preset to the list of available presets
To print using the settings in a print preset, you can choose the preset from the Print preset pop-up menu in the Print dialog box
Or, even easier, select the print preset name from the Print presets
Creating a Print Preset
Trang 12Figure 11-8 Creating a Print Preset
Choose Define from the Print
Presets submenu of the File
menu InDesign displays the
Print Presets dialog box
Enter a name for the new printer preset and set up the New Print Preset dialog box the way you want it.
To print using the printer preset, choose the preset name from the Print Presets sub- menu of the File menu (hold down Shift if you want to print without displaying the Print dialog box).
InDesign adds the new print
preset to the list of available
Click the New button
submenu of the File menu InDesign displays the Print dialog box Click the Print button (or the Save button, if you’re printing to disk), and InDesign prints the specified pages
To print without displaying the Print dialog box, hold down Shift
as you choose the print preset name from the Print Presets submenu
of the File menu
You can use the Print Presets dialog box to add presets, delete presets, rename presets, edit presets, or import or export print presets
Managing Print Presets
Trang 13▶ To create a new print preset that is based on an existing preset, open the Print Presets dialog box, select a print preset, and then click the New button Enter a name for your new print preset, then modify the settings in the panels of the Print dialog box
Note that this does not link the two presets—changes made
to the “parent” print preset will not affect any presets you’ve based on it
▶ To delete a print preset, select the preset name and click the Delete button
▶ To export a print preset (or presets), select one or more presets and click the Save button Specify a file name and location for the print presets document and click the OK button
▶ To import a print preset or set of presets, open the Print Presets dialog box and click the Load button Locate and select a print presets document (or an InDesign publication containing print presets), then click the OK button If the print presets you’re importing already exist in the publication, InDesign will create copies of the presets (InDesign will append a number—usually
“1”—to the duplicate print presets)
▶ To edit a print preset, select the preset name in the Print Presets dialog box, then click the Edit button InDesign displays the Print dialog box Make the changes and click the OK button to save the edited preset
Custom Printer Marks
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about our fellow desktop publishers over the years, it’s that you’re picky about printer’s marks You want
to control the offset of the crop marks and bleed marks from the edge
of the page You want to use star targets instead of, or in addition to, the standard registration marks You want the color bars to print at the top, the bottom, the left, or the right of the page
There is utterly no way for a page layout program to provide for all of your individual preferences—what’s right for one person is not just wrong, but is probably offensive to another
InDesign, in recognition of this fact, provides a (very obscure) way for you to define your own marks with printer’s marks defini-tion (also known as PMD or mrk) files They’re text files that can be edited with any text editor (the free TextWrangler on the Mac OS
Trang 14or Notepad in Windows work quite well) Once you’ve saved a PMD file to a specific folder on your system, a new entry will appear in the Type pop-up menu in the Marks and Bleed panel of the Print dialog box Choose the option, and InDesign will print using the marks defined in the file.
Instead of boring most of you with arcane code here, we’ve made this section, including example code, available as a PDF file for you
to download here: www.indesignsecrets.com/downloads/mrk.pdf
Printing Booklets
As we mentioned earlier, there’s an important difference between reader spreads and printer spreads In reader spreads, page 2 and 3 appear opposite each other, as left and right facing pages But if you want to print, fold up, trim, and bind a book or magazine, you need
to print it using printer spreads If you have an 8-page booklet, you need to print page 1 and 8 next to each other (the front and back cover), then page 2 and 7, then 3 and 6, and so on The process of
creating printer spreads is called imposition, and there are
expen-sive, dedicated applications (such as Kodak PREPS, Farrukh Systems Imposition Publisher, and Impostrip from Ultimate) that can impose
8 or 12 or 32 document pages onto an enormous plate
There are also a number of mid-range solutions—typically bat plug-ins such as Quite Imposing (www.quite.com)—that can impose any PDF
Acro-But what if you just want to print up a little booklet from inside InDesign? The answer is the Print Booklet feature, found at the bottom of the File menu Print Booklet is perfect for pretty much any small publication you would print on a desktop printer—such as a saddle-stapled office telephone directory Here’s how to manage the Print Booklet dialog box (see Figure 11-9):
1 If you have already created a Print Preset for your output device, you can choose it from the pop-up menu at the top of the dialog box Alternately, click the Print Settings button at the bottom of the dialog box to view the Print dialog box, pick a printer, and choose from all the features we’ve been talking about
2 Choose a page range to print For example, typing 1,6-11,18 will print pages 1, 6 through eleven, and 18
3 Pick an arrangement from the Booklet Type pop-up menu:
Trang 15▶ Saddle Stitch In a saddle-stitched imposition, you end up
folding all the sheets in half and stapling them in the middle (see Figure 11-10) InDesign can do 2-up saddle stitching, so you’d get two document pages printed on each side of the sheet of paper In most cases, this is what you’ll likely use
▶ Perfect Bound In a perfect bound imposition, you build
signatures, then bind those signatures together (typically
by gluing them inside spine a cover) InDesign only creates 2-up sheets (two pages on each side of the sheet) You need to specify how large each signature should be in the Signature Size pop-up menu
▶ Consecutive The Consecutive booklet type is for documents
such as tri-fold brochures where you want the first three pages of your document to be on one side of a sheet, and the fourth through sixth pages to be on the opposite side While
we can see the appeal of building your document this way, there are two problems First, the third panel of a trifold typically has to be slightly narrower than the first two, or else it won’t fold properly The amazing PageControl plug-in from DTPtools lets you create different-sized pages in your InDesign document, but we’re not sure how much to trust Print Booklet with these files
4 Enter values, if necessary, for Creep, Space Between Pages, and Bleed Between Pages
Figure 11-9 Print Booklet