Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

PDF Export Exhaustion

Grayscale PDF From a Color Layout

Our office periodically needs to create a grayscale PDF for one of our clients, even though their jobs are done in CMYK plus spot plates. There's no place to choose "grayscale" in the Export to PDF dialog box. We tried printing to the Adobe PDF printer instead, since the Print dialog box does offer Composite Gray as an Output choice, but some of the graphics didn't convert they stayed in color. We really don't want to have to re-create these files in grayscale, as some are over 200 pages long!

InDesign can convert colors to grayscale during the process you describe only if it can "get" to them. It does fine with any color created in InDesign itself (CMYK, RGB or Lab; process or spot), as well as placed color TIFFs and PSD files, even if the PSD has a spot color channel. However, InDesign won't change placed color EPS and PDF images into grayscale.

The good news is, through a simple hack, you can force InDesign to convert those recalcitrant images too. Nick Hodge first wrote about this trick for InDesign 2.0 and it still works in both CS and CS2.

He discovered that when any image is run through InDesign's transparency flattener, the program has a chance to adjust its colors to conform to the type of Color Output (in this case, Composite Gray) you set in the Print dialog box.

If you select one of your stubborn color images and set it to have a 99.9 percent opacity from the Transparency palette (Window > Transparency), it's enough to trigger the Transparency Flattener when you output to a flattened format (Figure 8-14, next page). That allows InDesign to get in there and convert it to grayscale while it's at it, without changing the look of the image at all, since the .1 percent that is transparent is not detectable.

Apply that transparency setting to any placed PDF or EPS images first. Then, when you print to the Adobe PDF printer, make sure that changing the Color Output to Composite Gray is the last thing you change in the dialog box before you click the Print button. We've found that sometimes, the selection reverts to the Composite CMYK choice if you go elsewhere in the dialog box, or click the Printer (or Setup, in Windows) button afterwards, before clicking the final Print button.

Printers Can't Take Exported PDFs

Oh, how I would love to use InDesign's handy Export to PDF presets and just choose one on the fly from the File menu. Alas, when I print to my old desktop laser printer, these PDF files always give me errors (or worse, just die without any error). My print vendor says she has trouble with PDFs created this way, too. I have to give them PDFs created "the old-fashioned way," by printing Postscript to disk and then running the .ps file through Distiller.

No doubt the troubles your old printer and your vendor are experiencing are due to InDesign CS's penchant for encoding all embedded fonts in exported PDFs as "CID," also known as "double-byte" encoding. While most modern-day RIPs do understand CID encodingthe format has been part of the Adobe Postscript specification for yearsothers choke on them. In contrast, when you write a file to Postscript (why are you doing that, anyway? You should be printing to the Adobe PDF printer, it's more convenient and does the same thing), fonts that don't require CID encoding are encoded normally as Type 1 or True Type fonts.

Fortunately, Adobe was listening, and the problem has been fixed in InDesign CS2. Exported PDFs are now no more nor less likely to contain CID-encoded fonts than PDFs created by printing to the Adobe PDF printer. Yet another reason to upgrade!

Export a Long Document as Single-page PDFs

Our workflow requires that we output our final magazine files as single-page PDFs. Which, of course, InDesign CS can't doEPSs sí; PDFs, no. When I heard that InDesign CS2 could import multiple pages of a PDF at once, I had my fingers crossed that it could work in reverse, too. Can I uncross my fingers now? Or must I still reserve two hours every month for the monkey work of exporting a single page after another to PDF, 272 times.

Hmmm. Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news first? Bad news: No, with InDesign CS2, just as with all previous versions, you cannot split a document into multiple, single-page PDFs when you export it to PDF. (Without the help of a script, that is check out Chris Paveglio's PDFBee at http://chris.paveglio.com if you're a Mac user.)

Good news: Open that behemoth PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Professional 7, go to Document > Extract Pages, and are you sitting down check out the new checkbox at the bottom of the dialog box, "Extract Pages as Separate Files." Yes dear, Acrobat Professional 7 can automatically split a multiple-page PDF into individual page PDFs and save them on your hard drive. Now you can uncross your fingers.

Placed PDFs Causing Postscript Errors

I'm in charge of producing our association's quarterly 4/C newsletter.