Printing Your Work
In This Chapter
ᮣ Previewing your files before you print
ᮣ Creating booklets
ᮣ Setting colors for accurate reproduction
ᮣ Printing your layouts to printers and other devices
ᮣ Collecting files for service bureaus
You’ve finished your document, and you want to share it with the whole world, or at least your audience. So you reach for your mouse and choose File➪Print or quickly press Ô+P or Ctrl+P so that you can print. Stop. Cancel. If this print job is your first with InDesign, you need to make sure that you’ve properly set up your printer to get the results you need. The process for doing so varies based on your operating system, and you can find instructions at the author’s Web site at www.InDesignCentral.com. Printing is more complex than just choosing File➪Print (Ô+P or Ctrl+P). At least it can be, depending on what you’re printing and on what printing device you’re using. For example, printing a full-color brochure involves more settings and steps than printing a proof copy to your laser printer or inkjet printer. So as you go through this chapter, keep in mind that many steps aren’t relevant every time you print — but understanding the basics of printing ensures that you follow the right steps for each type of project. When you know the steps for printing one document, the process for printing every other document takes little effort. Checking Your Document before Printing
Before you print, you should do a visual proof of your layout. It’s amazing what you don’t notice when you’re focused on specific elements as you lay out a page. Change your view setting so that the entire page or spread fits in the window (choose View➪Fit Page in Window [Ô+0 or Ctrl+0 — note the use of the numeral zero in the shortcut] or View➪Fit Spread in Window [Option+Ô+0
or Ctrl+Alt+0], as desired) and then review your pages.
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This visual check is a critical step before printing, but you should also use InDesign’s preflight tool to examine your document. The preflighting capability examines your document for any issues of concern and gives you a report on what you may need to fix.
You may wonder why you need a preflighting capability to check for things such as missing fonts and images: After all, InDesign lists any missing fonts and graphics when you open a document. The answer is that sometimes fonts and graphics files are moved after you open a file, in which case you won’t get the alerts from InDesign. This mistake is more likely to happen if you work with files and fonts on a network drive, rather than with local fonts and graphics. Preflighting also checks for other problematic issues, such as the use of RGB files and TrueType fonts.
Identifying and fixing errors
InDesign CS4 preflights your document as you’re working on it so that you can deal with surprises before the end of the project when you’re likely on a tight deadline. At the bottom of the document window, InDesign reveals whether it has found any errors and lets you access the Preflight panel and other options to both specify what the preflighting should be checking before and show you the issues it has found. Figure 23-1 shows this alert and its options. This new preflighting approach has also changed all the dialog boxes and most related settings compared to previous versions of InDesign.
If you’re working with the InDesign book feature (see Chapter 22), you can preflight the book’s chapters from an open book’s panel by using the Preflight Book option in its flyout menu. (If one or more documents in the book are selected in the panel, the menu option changes to Preflight Selected Documents.) The options are the same as for preflighting individual documents. Figure 23-1:
The preflight
alert at the
bottom of a
document,
as well as
its menu
options.
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You can turn preflighting on or off using either of these methods: ߜ
In the Preflight pop-up menu at the bottom of the document window, choose Preflight Document to toggle between off and on. If the menu option is checked, preflighting is turned on. You can also toggle off and on Enable Preflight for All Documents, which sets the default action for all documents. ߜ
In the Preflight panel (File➪Preflight [Shift+Option+Ô+F or Ctrl+Alt+
Shift+F]), enable the On option to turn preflighting on; disable it to turn preflighting off. The flyout menu has the Enable Preflight for All Documents option.
The Preflight panel shows all errors that InDesign has found in the Error pane, as Figure 23-2 shows. The errors are grouped by type; to see the individual errors, click the right-facing triangle to expand the group’s information. In the list of issues that appears, you’ll get a brief description and a hyperlink to the page that has the error. Each list may have several occurrences, in which case you’ll see another right-facing triangle that if clicked expands the list to show them all. And to get even more detail on a selected item, expand the Info pane by clicking its right-facing triangle (unless it’s already expanded, of course).
To “collapse” any lists (such as to get them out of the way as you look at other items), click the down-pointing triangles.
Figure 23-2:
The Preflight
panel with
sample
errors
displayed,
the
expanded
Info pane,
and the
flyout menu.
To get rid of the error notices, go to each page that has an issue and correct it. InDesign updates the preflight errors status as you do.
Telling InDesign what to check for
InDesign has its default set of issues to look for when preflighting. But you can set up your own options based on your specific needs. Although the process is
350 Part VII: Printing and Multimedia Essentials
simple, you’ll likely need to consult with your production manager or service bureau to determine what settings you want to enable in your profile — these settings are typically expert decisions.
Even if the choices require expertise to make, the process for setting up your preflight options is easy:
1. In the Preflight pop-up menu at the bottom of the document window or in the Preflight panel’s flyout menu, choose Define Profiles.
2. In the Preflight Profiles dialog box, shown in Figure 23-3, click the +
iconic button to add a new profile.
Use the – iconic button to delete a selected profile.
3. Give your profile a name and go through the options and select the ones you want InDesign to preflight for as you work.
A triangle to the left of an option means that you can select from suboptions; click the triangle (it then points down) to get those suboptions. (Click it again to “collapse” the suboptions so that they’re not in view.)
4. Click Save when done.
5. Use the + and – iconic buttons at left to add more profiles or remove existing profiles.
6. Click OK when done to exit the Preflight Profiles dialog box.
7. In the Preflight panel, choose the desired profile for the current document from the Profile pop-up menu.
If the Preflight panel isn’t open, choose File➪Preflight (Shift+Option+Ô+F
or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F) to open it.
Figure 23-3:
The Preflight
Options
dialog box
lets you
specify
what
settings
InDesign
looks for
when
checking
documents.
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Setting Up Booklets
One of the trickiest types of documents to print is a folded booklet: You can’t simply print the pages in sequence and have them end up on the right location on the final sheets of paper — when you fold them, you’ll find the page order is rearranged due to the folding, especially in two-sided documents. The tried-and-true approach is to use a booklet template that essentially provides a map of where pages should be so that when they’re printed and folded, they end up in the right place — and then arrange your pages in that order via the Pages panel. Figure 23-4 shows the natural order (1–8) that you typically think a booklet has, as well as the actual page order (8,1; 2,7; 6,3; and 4,5) in which it must be printed to appear as a sequence of 1 through 8. Figure 23-4:
Left: The
logical order
of pages
for a folded
booklet.
Right: The
order pages
must be
moved so
that they
print in
the right
sequence to
be folded.
To simplify this approach, use the Print Booklet dialog box (File➪Print Booklet). Here, you arrange your pages in the Pages panel in sequential order (1–8, in this case) and let the InDesign software figure out how to rearrange them for printing. Much easier! Figure 23-5 shows the Print Booklet dialog box’s Setup pane.
Here are the key controls:
ߜ
Booklet Type: This pop-up menu is the key control. Here, you choose the type of booklet, which tells InDesign how to arrange the pages when printing so that they’re in the right sequence after folding. Your options are
352 Part VII: Printing and Multimedia Essentials
Figure 23-5:
The Setup
pane of
the Print
Booklet
dialog box.
•
2-up Saddle Stitch: A folded sheet that contains two pages on each side, with the staples in the centerfold, between the pages. Newsletters, smaller magazines, and many office documents use
this option.
•
2-up Perfect Bound: A folded sheet that contains two pages on each side, where the pages are stacked and folded and then cut and held together with a glued backing or spine-based binding. This option is typically used in books, larger magazines, and catalogs (because the square binding holds more pages than saddle-stitching does).
•
2-up Consecutive: A sheet that contains two pages on one side, with each page then cut and bound. This setup is essentially
normal printing except that it uses a two-page sheet to print two pages at a time rather than a separate sheet for each page.
•
3-up Consecutive: Like 2-up Consecutive, except three pages are on a sheet.
•
4-up Consecutive: Like 2-up Consecutive, except four pages appear on a sheet.
ߜ
Space Between Pages (not available for 2-up Saddle Stitch) and Bleed Between Pages (available for 2-up Perfect Bound only): These options let you adjust the relative spacing among pages and objects, typically to provide additional white space around the folds.
ߜ
Creep (not available for the Consecutive options): This option shifts pages’ contents away from the spine in increasing amounts as pages fall from the center of the booklet to the outside of the booklet. Because outside pages have to fold over many inside pages, their content can end up obscured in the inside margins because their gutter is eaten up by folding over those other pages. The Creep option corrects this problem. Chapter 23: Printing Your Work
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Signature Size (available only for 2-up Perfect Bound): This option specifies how many pages are printed on each side of a sheet: 4, 8, 16, or 32. ߜ
Automatically Adjust to Fit Marks and Bleeds: This option ensures that crop marks, bleeds, and other content that appears outside the page boundary are properly handled for the chosen booklet type. If not checked, you can manually adjust these settings using the Top, Bottom, Left, and Right fields.
When using these features, consult with your professional printer or service bureau for the appropriate settings. If you’re printing the documents yourself, do a test run, then fold, cut, and/or staple the sample document to make sure that it works as expected before printing lots of copies. The Preview pane shows the results of your choices, but doing a dry run is always the safest option. When you’re happy with your settings, choose Print to get the standard Print dialog box (covered in the “Choosing Print Options” section, later in this chapter). You can also choose Print Settings to set up printer-specific controls (also covered in that section).
Calibrating Color
If you’re producing color documents for printing on a printing press, you may want to use InDesign’s built-in color calibration tools. In a sense, you have to, because InDesign’s color calibration is always on. But color calibration is something you don’t do in a vacuum — you have to do it in your graphics programs as well so that every piece of software that handles your graphics is working from the same color assumptions.
If you use Adobe Creative Suite 4, you can use a consistent color management system (CMS) in all print-oriented CS4 programs, ensuring consistent color. For scanned images, digital camera photos, and the like, you can also tell InDesign the source device so that InDesign knows the color assumptions that the device makes and can use that information to adjust the colors during printing accordingly.
You can set the CMS settings in InDesign by choosing Edit➪Color Settings to get the Color Settings dialog box shown in Figure 23-6.
Many of Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 applications have the same dialog box, although sometimes you access it in different ways:
ߜ
Bridge CS4: Choose Edit➪Creative Suite Color Settings (Shift+Ô+K
or Ctrl+Shift+K). This action sets the defaults for all CS4 applications, although you can modify individual applications, as described in the next three bullets. Note that if individual applications’ color settings
354 Part VII: Printing and Multimedia Essentials
differ from the CS4-wide settings, you see a note to that effect at the top of the affected applications’ Color Settings dialog boxes.
ߜ
Acrobat Professional 9: Choose Acrobat➪Preferences (Ô+K) on the Mac or choose Edit➪Preferences (Ctrl+K) in Windows. Then go to the Color Management pane. Note that this pane’s appearance differs from the appearance of the Color Settings dialog boxes in the other Creative Suite 4 applications.
ߜ
Illustrator CS4: Choose Edit➪Color Settings (Shift+Ô+K or Ctrl+Shift+K). ߜ
Photoshop CS4: Choose Edit➪Color Settings (Shift+Ô+K or Ctrl+Shift+K). Note that the following CS4 applications have no CMS controls: Adobe Device Manager, Dreamweaver, and Flash Professional.
Figure 23-6:
The Color
Settings
dialog box
lets you set
application color
defaults.
When you place a bitmapped image into InDesign, the CMS applies the default settings defined in the Color Settings dialog box. (Choose Edit➪Color Settings.) If the document has no embedded color profile, a dialog box appears with a list of color profiles, as well as options to apply the default you’ve set up in InDesign or to apply no profile. (If you choose not to apply a profile, the color won’t be adjusted during printing.)
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Whether or not the document has embedded profiles, you can change the color settings for specific images as follows:
ߜ
As you import each file, select Show Import Options in the Place dialog box (choose File➪Place [Ô+D or Ctrl+D]) when you place a graphic into InDesign. In the resulting Image Import Options dialog box, go to the Color pane and select the appropriate profile from the Profile menu. ߜ
Any time after you place an image, select it and choose Object➪Image Color Settings to apply a different profile. (You can also choose Graphics➪Image Color Settings from the contextual menu that appears when you Control+click or right-click a graphic in InDesign.)
You can save and use color management settings in other documents. The process is simple: Click Save in the Color Settings dialog box to save the current dialog box’s settings to a file. If you want to use the saved color-settings information in another document, open that document, click Load in the Color Settings dialog box, and then browse for and select the color settings file. That’s it! This technique is a handy way to ensure consistency in a workgroup. If you put together a document with specific color settings, but then decide you want to apply a new profile across your pictures or replace a specific profile globally in your document, you have a couple of options: ߜ
Choose Edit➪Assign Profiles to replace the color management settings globally for the document, setting the target color settings for output. ߜ
Choose Edit➪Convert to Profile to change the document’s working color workspace. It also lets you change the CMS engine, rendering intent, and black-point compensation settings. This does not change your output color settings but instead changes the source profiles assigned to the images so you can test different color settings in on-screen preview mode (View➪Proof Colors).
Be sure to consult with a production manager or service bureau manager if you change these expert settings.
When you’re ready to output your document to a printer or other device, set the profile and rendering intent for that destination device in the Color Management pane of the Print dialog box (choose File➪Print [Ô+P or Ctrl+P]), which has an Options section with the Color Handling and Printer Profile pop-up menus. Here, you select the appropriate option for your output device. (If you don’t know, ask an expert.)
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Choosing Print Options
When your document is ready to print, go to the Print dialog box. (Choose File➪Print [Ô+P or Ctrl+P].) The Print dialog box has eight panes as well as several options common to all the panes. (I cover just the essential ones here.) Change any options and click Print, and InDesign sends your document to the printer. Figure 23-7 shows the dialog box.
If you’re working with the InDesign book feature (see Chapter 22), you can print the book’s chapters from an open book’s panel by using the Print Book option in its flyout menu. (If one or more documents in the book are selected in the panel, the menu option changes to Print Selected Documents.) The setup options are the same as for printing individual documents. Figure 23-7:
The default
view for the
Print dialog
box, whose
General
pane is
where you
set page
and paper
options.
The common options available in the dialog box, no matter what pane is selected, are as follows:
ߜ
Print Preset pop-up menu: This pop-up menu lets you choose a previously defined set of printer settings, which makes it easy to switch between, say, a proofing printer and a final output device.
ߜ
Printer pop-up menu: This pop-up menu lets you select the printer to use. Chapter 23: Printing Your Work
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PPD pop-up menu: This pop-up menu lets you select PostScript Printer Descriptions, which are files that contain configuration and feature information specific to a brand and model of printer. You usually install these files into your operating system by using software that comes from your printer manufacturer. If InDesign finds no compatible PPDs, it uses generic options. If InDesign finds just one compatible PPD, it uses that automatically; otherwise, it lets you select a PPD.
ߜ
Save Preset button: Clicking this button saves any settings that you change in the Print dialog box and lets you choose a name for those saved settings for reuse. If you change the dialog box’s settings but don’t save these changes as a print preset, InDesign changes the name of the current settings in the Print Preset pop-up menu to [Custom] to remind you that the settings are changed and unsaved.
You can also create print presets by choosing File➪Print Presets➪Define or edit an existing preset by choosing File➪Print Presets➪ preset name. When you click New or Edit in the resulting dialog box, a dialog box identical to the Print dialog box appears, except that the Print button becomes the OK button.
ߜ
Setup button (Windows); Page Setup and Printer buttons (Mac): These buttons give you access to printer-specific controls. You use these dialog boxes to specify options such as printing to file, paper sources, and printer resolution. Note that if you add a printer, you may need to quit InDesign and restart it for it to see the new printer.
ߜ
Cancel button: Clicking this button closes the Print dialog box without printing. Use this button if you’ve clicked Save Preset but don’t want to print, as well when you have any reason not to print.
ߜ
Print button: Clicking this button prints the document based on the current settings.
ߜ
Page preview subpane: This subpane at the lower left shows the current settings graphically. The page is indicated by the blue rectangle, and the direction of the large P indicates the printing orientation; in Figure 23-7 the P is unrotated. The figure’s subpane shows that the paper itself is the same size as the page (the page is shown in white, and if the paper were larger than the page, you’d see a light gray area around the page indicating the excess paper). This preview changes as you adjust settings in the dialog box.
The General pane
The General pane contains the basic settings for your print job. Most are selfexplanatory, but note the following: 358 Part VII: Printing and Multimedia Essentials
ߜ
When specifying a range of pages in the Pages Range option, you can type nonconsecutive ranges, such as 1–4, 7, 10–13, 15, 18, 20. If you want to print from a specific page to the end of the document, just type the hyphen after the initial page number, such as 4–. InDesign figures out what the last page is. Similarly, to start from the first page and end on a specified page, just start with the hyphen, as in –11. InDesign lets you type absolute page numbers in the Range field. For example, typing
+6–+12 would print the document’s 6th through 12th pages, no matter what their page numbers are.
ߜ
Selecting the Spreads option prints facing pages on the same sheet of paper, such as putting two letter-size pages on one 11-×-17-inch sheet. This option is handy when showing clients proposed designs, but make sure that you have a printer that can handle a large paper size or that you scale the output down to fit (through the Setup pane, which I cover in the following section).
ߜ
The Options section lets you print various layout components that you typically don’t want in final output but may be useful when sharing comps and other in-progress printouts with others, such as baseline grids and nonprinting objects such as formatting notes.
ߜ
A handy control in the Options section is the Print Layers pop-up menu, which gives you additional control over how layers are marked as nonprinting print. The default option, Visible & Printable Layers, honors your layers’ printing status. Visible Layers prints all visible layers, including those marked as nonprinting. All Layers prints both visible and hidden layers, including those marked as nonprinting. (See Chapter 5 for more on layers.)
The Setup pane
The Setup pane is where you tell InDesign how to work with the paper (or other media, such as film negatives) to which you’re printing. The options are straightforward, so I just highlight a few notes and tips: ߜ
Custom paper size: Choosing some printer models will in turn let you choose a Custom option in the Paper Size pop-up menu, in which case you type the dimensions in the Width and Height fields, as well as position the output through the Offset and Gap fields. These latter two options are usually used when printing to a roll, such as in an imagesetter using photo paper (called RC paper, a resin-coated paper that keeps details extremely sharp), so that you can make sure that a space appears between the left edge of the roll and the page boundary (the offset), as well as between pages (the gap). Most printers can’t print right to the edge, thus the Offset setting. You also want a gap between pages for crop and registration marks, as well as to have room to physically cut the pages.
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Transverse option: Don’t use the Transverse option, which rotates the output 90 degrees, unless your service bureau or production department tells you to. Otherwise, you may have your pages cut off on the final negatives.
ߜ
Tile options: Use the Tile options to print oversized documents. InDesign breaks the document into separate pages — called tiles — that you later can assemble together. To enable tiling, select the Tile check box and then choose the appropriate option from the adjoining pop-up menu:
•
Manual: This option lets you specify the tiles yourself. To specify a tile, you change the origin point on the document ruler, and the new origin point becomes the upper-left corner of the current tile. (To change the origin point, just drag the upper-left corner of the rulers to a new position in your document.) To print multiple tiles this way, you need to adjust the origin point and print, adjust the origin point to the next location and print, and so on, until you’re done.
•
Auto: This option lets InDesign figure out where to divide the pages into tiles. You can change the default amount of overlap between tiles of 1.5 inches by using the Overlap field. The overlap lets you easily align tiles by having enough overlap for you to see where each should be placed relative to the others.
•
Auto
Justified: This option is similar to Auto except that it makes each tile the same size, adjusting the overlap if needed to do that. (The Auto option, by contrast, simply starts at the origin point and then does as much of the page as will fit in the tile, which means the last tile may be a different width than the others.) You can see the difference between the two by watching how the page preview window at left changes as you select each option.
The Marks and Bleed pane
The Bleed and Slug area of the Marks and Bleed pane controls how materials print past the page boundary. A bleed is used when you want a picture, color, or text to go right to the edge of the paper. Because there is slight variation on positioning when you print because the paper moves mechanically through rollers and might move slightly during transit, publishers have any to-the-edge materials actually print beyond the edge so that gaps never appear. It’s essentially a safety margin. A normal bleed margin is 0p9 (1⁄8 inch), although you can make it larger if you want.
A slug is an area beyond the bleed area in which you want printer’s marks to appear. The reader never sees this area, but the workers at the commercial printer do, and it helps them make sure that they have the right pages, colors, and so on. Like the bleed, the slug area is trimmed off when the pages are bound into a magazine, newspaper, or whatever. (The word slug is an old newspaper term for this identifying information, based on the lead slug once used 360 Part VII: Printing and Multimedia Essentials
for this purpose on old printing presses.) The purpose of the slug is to ensure that you have enough room for all the printer’s marks to appear between the bleed area and the edges of the page. Otherwise, InDesign does the best it can. It’s best to define your bleed and slug areas in your document itself when you create the document in the New Document dialog box (choose File➪New➪Document [Ô+N or Ctrl+N]), as covered in Chapter 3. You can also use the Document Setup dialog box. (Choose File➪Document Setup
[Option+Ô+P or Ctrl+Alt+P].) The two dialog boxes have the same options; if they don’t show the Bleed and Slug section, click More Options to see it. But if you didn’t define your bleeds previously, you can do so in the Print dialog box’s Marks and Bleed pane. You can also override those New Document or Document Setup document settings here. To use the document settings, select the Use Document Bleed Settings option. Otherwise, type in a bleed area by using the Top, Bottom, Left, and Right fields. If you want the four fields to be the same, click the broken-chain iconic button to the right of the Top field; it becomes a solid chain, indicating that all four fields will have the same value if any are modified. Any bleed area is indicated in red in the preview pane at the bottom left.
If you want to set the slug area, select the Include Slug Area option. InDesign then reserves any slug area defined in the New Document or Document Setup dialog box. You can’t set up the slug area in the Print dialog box. The Output pane
The next pane is the Output pane, which controls the processing of colors and inks on imagesetters, platesetters, and commercial printing equipment. For proof printing, such as to a laser printer or an inkjet printer, the only option that you need to worry about is on the Color pop-up menu, which controls whether the colors print as color or as grayscale.
The options in the Output pane are for experts and should be specified in coordination with your service bureau and commercial printer — these options can really mess up your printing if set incorrectly.
One area that you should set is in the Ink Manager dialog box. Accessed by clicking Ink Manager, the Ink Manager dialog box, shown in Figure 23-8, gives you finer controls over how color negatives output. If any colors should have been converted to process color but weren’t, you have three choices: ߜ
Click the spot color iconic button. You can override the spot color in the Ink Manager dialog box by clicking this button (a circle icon) to the left of the color’s name. That action converts the spot color to a process color. (Clicking the process color button, a four-color box icon, converts a color back to a spot color.) This is the way to go for a quick fix.
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Make the spot color a process color instead. Do so by closing the Ink Manager and Print dialog boxes and editing the color that was incorrectly set as a spot color in the Swatches panel (choose Window➪Swatches [F5]), as I cover in Chapter 6. Using the Swatches panel instead of fixing this color setting at output time in the Print dialog box ensures that the color is permanently changed to a process color for future print jobs.
ߜ
Convert all spot colors to CMYK process equivalents. Do so by selecting the All Spots to Process option. This method is the easiest way to make sure that you don’t accidentally print spot-color plates for a CMYK-only document.
The other Ink Manager options are for experts and should be changed only in consultation with your service bureau, production department, and/or commercial printer.
Figure 23-8:
The Output
pane (left)
and the Ink
Manager
dialog box
(right).
The Graphics pane
By using the Graphics pane, you control how graphics are printed and how fonts are downloaded. The options here are meant for professional printing, such as to imagesetters, in situations where you’re working with a service bureau or in-house printing department. This pane is also an expert area, so change these settings only after consulting with an experienced pro. 362 Part VII: Printing and Multimedia Essentials
The Color Management pane
The Color Management pane is where you manage color output (apply color calibration). Most options should be changed only in consultation with your service bureau or production department.
One option you should be able to change on your own is Printer Profile. Use this pop-up menu to select the device to which the document will ultimately be printed. This printer is by default the same as the profile selected in the Edit Color Settings dialog box, which I cover earlier in this chapter, in the section “Calibrating Color.”
The Advanced pane
The options in the Advanced pane let you control graphics file substitutions in an Open Prepress Interface (OPI) workflow and also set transparency flattening, which controls how transparent and semitransparent objects are handled during output. Again, you should change these expert options only in consultation with your service bureau or production department. The Summary pane
The final Print dialog box pane is the Summary pane. It simply lists your settings all in one place for easy review. The only option — Save Summary — saves the settings to a file so that you can include it with your files when delivering them to a service bureau or for distribution to other staff members so that they know the preferred settings.
Creating a Document Package
Have you ever given a page-layout document to a service bureau only to be called several hours later because some of the files necessary to output your document are missing? If so, you’ll love the Package feature in InDesign. This command, which you access by choosing File➪Package (Option+Shift+
Ô+P or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+P), copies into a folder all the font, color-output, and graphics files necessary to output your document. It also generates a report that contains all the information about your document that a service bureau is ever likely to need, including the document’s fonts, dimensions, and trapping information. You can also create an instructions file that has your contact information and any particulars you want to say about the document. Chapter 23: Printing Your Work
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When you run the Package command, InDesign preflights your document automatically and gives you the option of viewing any problems it encounters. If you elect to view that information, the Preflight dialog box appears. You can continue to package your document from that dialog box by clicking Package after you assure yourself that none of the problems will affect the document’s output. If it finds no problems during the automatic preflighting, InDesign doesn’t display the Preflight dialog box.
Although InDesign CS4 preflights your document automatically by default, as the “Checking Your Document before Printing” section, earlier in this chapter explains, the Package command still does its own preflighting, using a core set of issues that Adobe has decided need to be handled even if you let them slide in your own preflighting. You can of course ignore them, but don’t expect great output results if you do.
Before you can actually package the document, InDesign asks you to save the current document and then fill in the Printing Instructions form. You can change the default filename from Instructions.txt to something more suitable, such as the name of your print job. Often, you’ll leave the printing instructions blank — use the form only if you have special instructions. If
you
don’t want to create an instructions form when packaging a document, don’t click Cancel — it cancels the entire package operation. Just click Continue, leaving the form blank. Similarly, you must click Save at the request to save the document; clicking Cancel stops the package operation as well. The next step is to create the package folder. You do so in the dialog box that follows the Printing Instructions form, which on the Mac is called Create Package Folder and in Windows is called Package Publication. Figure 23-9
shows the Mac version, which, except for the name at the top, is the same as the Windows version.
In the dialog box, you can select what is copied: the fonts, color-output profiles, and linked graphics (graphics pasted into an InDesign document rather than imported are automatically included). You can also tell InDesign to update the graphics links for those that were modified or moved; if this Update Graphic Links in Package option isn’t selected, any missing or modified graphics files won’t be copied with the document. You can tell InDesign to include fonts and links from hidden layers (which you’d do only if you want the service bureau to print those hidden layers or if you were giving the document’s files to a colleague to do further work). You also can specify whether the document should use only the hyphenation exceptions defined within it. This option often makes sense because it ensures that the printer’s hyphenation dictionary — which may differ from yours — doesn’t cause text to flow differently.
364 Part VII: Printing and Multimedia Essentials
Figure 23-9:
The Create
Package
Folder
dialog box
for Mac is
called the
Package
Publication
dialog box in
Windows.
Finally, you can choose to view the report after the package is created — on the Mac, InDesign launches TextEdit and displays the report file, and on Windows it launches Notepad and displays the report file.
Click Save (on the Mac) or Package (in Windows) when everything is ready to go. Your document is placed in the folder you specify, as is the instructions file (the report). Inside that folder, InDesign also creates a folder called Fonts that includes the fonts, a folder called Links that has the graphics files, and a folder called Output Profiles that has the color output profiles. Don’t panic when you see a dialog box appear that warns you that sharing fonts could be illegal. If you’re working with a reputable service bureau, they’ll use the packaged fonts only for your job and then delete them. A font license typically allows you to share fonts for such temporary usage, but of course not to give away fonts to others for other uses. Anyone who needs the fonts on an ongoing basis should buy them.
I strongly recommend using the Package feature. It ensures that your service bureau has all the necessary files and information to output your document correctly.