لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Printing Issues in the Studio
Show Me the Printer
All our programs can print to our "Old Reliable" PostScript Level 2 laser printer except InDesign. The name of our printer doesn't even show up in InDesign's Print dialog box.Could Old Reliable possibly be Really Old Reliable? Because officially, InDesign only understands PPD (Postscript Printer Description) files that are version 4.3 or later, as virtually every PPD made since the late 90s are up to. You can figure out the version of your PPD by opening it in a text editor and looking for a line that begins "FormatVersion:" (Figure 8-1). If you're not seeing the magic number 4.3 (or higher) after the colon, contact your printer manufacturer for an update. Most companies have a page on their web site where you can download the latest version of their PPDs free of charge.
Figure 8-1. This Lexmark PPD is good to go: Note the "FormatVersion: 4.3" toward the bottom of the screen shot.
Is your PPD flaky? Try a new model. Sometimes if a particular PPD isn't working quite right printouts show bizarre colors, objects are shifting or scaling every so slightly you can get better results by swapping it out for the PPD that goes with the more recent, or slightly higher-end version of your printer.
Kick Start the Print Spooler
InDesign says it's printing the page, but it never actually prints. The job just sits in the print spooler, churning away, with no printout after almost an hour.Your printer might be having trouble with the fonts that are being downloaded for the job. Cancel any print jobs stuck in Print Spooler purgatory, and restart your printer to flush out any detritus left over from its struggles with the job.Now, go back to the InDesign file and open the Print dialog box again. Select the Graphics category and in the Fonts area, change the Download type from Complete (the default) to Subset (Figure 8-2). This choice sends far less code for each typeface you've used in the document to your hard-working printer. Click OK and see if that didn't do the trick.
Figure 8-2. Tweaking the default settings in the Graphics panel of the Print dialog box is key to successful printing to your office laser printer or inkjet.
[View full size image]
Make Your Apostrophes Reappear
My printout looks fine except that in some of the text, there's white space where there should be apostrophes, trademark symbols, and other high ASCII characters. Your printer is probably substituting its own built-in fonts for the ones you specified in your document, and having a little trouble with the substitution. To force the printer to use the robust Helvetica that's on your computer instead of its own 90-pound weakling version, make sure that the "Download PPD Fonts" checkbox is turned on in the Print dialog box's Graphics panel (Figure 8-2). Why did they sneak this font feature into the Graphics panel? Just to keep you on your toes.
Restore Quality to Bitmap Graphic Output
I don't understand why my photos look so beautiful in InDesign but come out muddy, blurry, and pixelated in my printouts. The Links palette says the image is up to date, and the Info palette confirms its Effective Resolution is 300 ppi. When I print the same image directly from Photoshop, it comes out great, so I know it's not my printer or the paper type.Most of the time, the cause of this problem is InDesign getting a little too enthusiastic with "Optimized Subsampling" shenanigans when processing the images to send to your printer. You can turn this option off (it's on by default) in the Print dialog box's Graphics > Images area. Change the Send Data popup menu option from Optimized Subsampling to All (Figure 8-2, previous page). Printing pages with high-res images will take a little longer, but the results may be worth it.This would be a perfect option to save in a Print Preset, by the way.TipAre you the InDy geek in the office with the twelve custom Print presets? Share the wealth and set up your co-workers with the same goodiesthey'll be extra-nice to you on your birthday. To create stand-alone presets (file type .prst) that you can put on a server or attach to an e-mail, open the "Define" dialog box for that type of preset. For example, choose File > Print Presets > Define to make Print Preset files. That's where you'll find the magical Save button that prompts you for a Save location (unlike the Save Preset button in the Print dialog box, which just includes presets in your InDesign preferences file). Your co-workers should use this same dialog box to Load the presets you've so generously sent their way.
Fix Disappearing Graphics
I can see all the images in my layout with no problem. When I print it out, though, some of them disappear! When I exported it to PDF, the images were gone there as well. According to the Attributes palette, they should print just fine (the Nonprinting checkbox isn't checked). The Links palette says they're up to date. They print fine when I "open original" and print from Illustrator. I can't figure it out!This is a known problem with some QuarkXPress documents that have been converted into InDesign files. Somehow during the conversion process, any EPS images that were in the QuarkXPress document get set to "nonprinting."Checking your layout in Preview mode (press the "W" key) will show you if any of your images inadvertently carry the nonprinting tag. Preview mode is true to its word: If an image isn't going to make it through the printing/exporting to PDF process; you won't see it in Preview mode either. The Normal (non-preview) mode, on the other hand, shows you every image regardless.If you see some images disappear in Preview and you're in a hurry, you can do an end-run around the problem by turning on the Print Non-printing Objects checkbox in the General panel of the Print dialog box. If you're exporting the layout to PDF, turn on the [Include] Non-printing Objects checkbox in the Export Adobe PDF dialog box.There's only one way to permanently fix the problem, though. Open the Attributes palette. Grab the Direct Select tool and click on the nonprinting image, not its frame. You'll see a checkmark next to the Nonprinting option in the palette. (Selecting the same image with the regular Selection tool won't work, as you've discovered. Only the Direct Select tool knows for sure.) Click the checkbox to turn off the Nonprinting attribute. Do this for each problem child image and you're good to go.If you're on a Mac, you can go to the InDesign Scripts area at http://share.studio.adobe.com and download "Make all printable.scpt," a free AppleScript written by Rick Johnson. Running the script from the Scripts palette removes the Nonprinting attribute from all graphics in the active layout.
Batch Printing Without a Plugin
We create over fifty versions of the same newsletter each month, each differing only by their masthead and banners, for dentists around the country to send to their patients. It's such a chore to have to open each file in InDesign and go through the Print dialog box fifty times to make print proofs. A batch print function would be a real time-saver!InDesign has secret Batch Print, Batch Preflight, Batch Package, and Batch Export to PDF commands. They're hidden in the Book palette menu. Who cares if your newsletters aren't really book chapters? Not InDesign.Create a book file by choosing File > New > Book, naming it something like "Dentist Newsletters" and saving the .indb file where you won't lose it, like in the same folder as the newsletters. The Book palette immediately opens, empty for now.Choose Book Page Numbering Options from the Book palette's menu and turn off the Automatic Pagination checkbox. If you don't turn this off, you'll have to deal with InDesign forever trying to change each documents' page numbers (see Note on page 207). Click OK to leave the dialog box.Now choose Add Documents from the Book palette menu or click the plus symbol icon at the bottom. Then Shift- or Command/Ctrl-click all the newsletter files in the Open/Save dialog box, and click OK. Bam, they all appear in the palette (Figure 8-3). Didn't know it was that easy, did you? (This doesn't move or duplicate your files, by the way, it just collects references to them, sort of like the Links palette does with placed images.)
Figure 8-3. Use InDesign's Book palette to batch print multiple files, even if they're not chapters or sections of a single document.
[View full size image]
Print Trim Borders in Page Proofs
Our editors need to see page borders defining the trim edge when they're editing layout proof printouts. Before we switched to InDesign, we used a commercial XTension that added these for us, but there's no equivalent plug-in for our beloved InDesign.NOTE
After you turn off the Automatic Pagination feature in the Book Page Numbering Options dialog box and add your documents to the Book palette, everything appears hunky dory. However, as soon as you add or remove a page from one of the documents and save the file, InDesign displays a warning icon in the Book palette.The only way to make that icon go away is to choose Repaginate from the palette menu, but if you do that, then each document's page numbers will be reset sequentially (like chapters in a book). If you don't use the Automatic Page Number character in your document, then no harm done. But what if you do use automatic page numbering in a document and you actually wanted each file to start at page one?The fix is to set each document to start at page one (or whatever page you want them to start at), which you can do by clicking on a file in the Book palette and choosing Document Page Numbering Options from the palette menu (or just double-click on the page numbers next to the file's name in the palette). It's tedious to have to do this for every document, but you only have to go through the process once.How about something even better: a free, cross-platform JavaScript? Cari Jansen, one of Australia's top InDesign trainers, offers a script called "1 pt. Stroke All Pages.js" (they're very literal downunder), free for the downloading at her web site: www.carijansen.com. Drop the script into InDesign's scripts folder (Adobe InDesign > Presets > Scripts) and it's immediately available in your Scripts palette (choose Window > Automation > Scripts).When you double-click the script name in the Scripts palette, it adds a one point border actually a rectangle shape frame with a stroke of one point and a fill of None to every document page. The script automatically puts the frames on their own layer ("The Border Layer") above any existing layers in the document, so they appear above any existing page bleeds. If you hide the layer, the borders won't print exactly what you want to do when creating press-ready PDFs for your print vendor.You could create trim borders manually (create your own border layer and add the frames to all the master pages, or to one parent master that all others are based on), but why go to the trouble? Just download the script and e-mail a thank you to Cari.
Add Page Numbers to Thumbnails
I can't believe that the Thumbnails option in the Print dialog box doesn't add page number labels to the output! When you're cramming sixteen miniature tabloid pages into a single letter-size printout, you need a microscope to see the pages' actual folios.We think this is one more confirmation that Adobe software engineers have super-human eyeballs note, too, how the text in the palettes seems to get smaller with every upgrade. Fortunately, a normal human was able to sneak in a fix, and thumbnail pages are now numbered in InDesign CS2. Sell the microscope on eBay and buy everyone an upgrade.TipIf you want some page items to appear on some printouts, but not others (as in the Trim Borders example above), consider selecting them and turning on the Nonprinting option from the Attributes palette. It's the only "print or not print" toggle that InDesign's Print dialog box offers. By default, objects set to Nonprinting will not print or appear on PDFs exported from InDesign. When you do want these items to print, turn on the Print Nonprinting Objects checkbox at the bottom of the General panel in the Print or Export dialog boxes.Even better, if all your selective printing objects are on the same layer, you can Option/Alt-click the layer name to select them all, then set the selection to Nonprinting with just one click in the Attributes palette. But of course, if they're all on the same layer, you could just turn off that layer (hide it) before printing to do the same thing. Well, it's nice to have options.
Set up Printer's Spreads
Our in-house print department requires us to give them PDFs set up in printer's spreads (the last page is opposite of the first page, page 2 is next to page 7, etc.) instead of the normal "reader's spreads." We can do it by dragging pages around in the Pages palette, but it's a bear to do manually with a long document. I looked in Preferences but there doesn't seem to be any way to change the default "spread type" for facing pages, nor any command in the Print or Export to PDF dialog box that makes printer's spreads automatically.If you're using InDesign CS, you can purchase Adobe's PageMaker Plugin Pack, which adds a number of handy features to InDesign, imposition (creating printer's spreads) being one of them. The specific plugin that offers the feature is called InBooklet SE, a "special edition" of a more fully-featured (and expensive) version of ALAP's InBooklet plugin. InBooklet SE can convert a copy of your reader's spread files into simple 2-up printer spreads (
Figure 8-4. InBooklet SE makes it easy to create printer's spreads of your InDesign layouts.
[View full size image]
