InDesign for QuarkXPress Users [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Customizing PDF Export

XPress has an Export as PDF dialog box (if you use the PDF Filter XTension) which lets you add comments to the PDF file, such as name, keywords, and author information. Similarly, if you type document name and author information into the File Info dialog box (under the File menu), InDesign saves this information in the exported PDF file. InDesign does offer a number of other PDF-specific options that XPress does not. You can select from among the first five of the six panels listed along the left side of the PDF Export dialog box to customize how the PDF is created. Note that you can choose these panels by clicking on them; by holding down the Command/Ctrl key while pressing a number, 1 through 6; or by pressing Command/Ctrl-Page Up or Page Down.

While we cover some of the many PDF options here, Christopher's

Teach Yourself Adobe Acrobat book has several chapters devoted to settings used when creating PDF files, and David's

Real World InDesign 2 goes into more depth, especially for the more picayune choices.

General

Using the options in the General panel (see Figure 99-1), you can specify which pages will be exported, and if adjoining pages should be exported as spreads. Among the many options listed, the Include Hyperlinks option does exactly the same thing as the feature of the same name in the QuarkXPress Export as PDF dialog box: it lets you export document lists (tables of contents) and index entries as hyperlinks. InDesign also lets you specify if PDF bookmarks will be included (you must have already have used the Table of Contents feature for this to work; see Chapter 89), and if grids and guides should appear in the final PDF file.

Compression

You can use the Compression panel settings to define the quality of placed bitmapped images in the PDF file (see Figure 99-2). The lower the resolution and the higher the compression the smaller the file sizebut the tradeoff is reduced quality. This panel is similar to a panel in the Export as PDF dialog box in XPress, and to the Compression panel in the Job Options dialog box in Distiller.

Note that turning on the Crop Image Data to Frames option helps reduce the size of the file by eliminating data that is not visible. This limits the ability for someone else to later to reposition an image within a frame, but this type of editing is rarely performed in PDF files. The Compress Text and Line Art compresses page objects created in InDesign; we can't think of any reason to ever turn this off.

Marks & Bleeds

If you have bled objects off the side of your page, or if you need crop marks around the corners, you'll need to set these up in the Marks & Bleeds panel (see Figure 99-3); the preset Press style doesn't do either of these for you. You can also set the offset (distance from the page) and weight of trim marks you add.

Advanced

You can use the Advanced panel settings to define how color is converted when exporting to PDF (see Chapters 95 and 97 and the color management options in Chapter 87.

InDesign also lets you determine whether fonts are embedded completely or subsetted. By setting the Subset Fonts Below setting at a high value (like 100%), InDesign only embeds the characters you use in the PDF file and not the entire font family. If you set this at a lower value (like 0%), the entire font will get embedded and not just the characters used in the document. David likes to set this to zero percent for documents destined for a printer or output provider because he likes the whole font to be embedded, but Christopher and Steve tend to set it to 100 percent. To each their own.

Security

If you want to make your printer very unhappy, you can apply security to a PDF file to limit access to the file or restrict printing or editing. Use a Master password to restrict someone from changing or removing your security settings; apply an User password if you want users to input a password before viewing the file. Beware that it is very difficult to remove these restrictions if you forget the password. These security settings only apply to the PDF you are creating, not to the original InDesign file.

After you have finished with the Security settings you can then review all of the settings applied to the PDF you're creating by clicking the Summary panel.