Preflighting with InDesign

Want a happy relationship with your printer? Follow the guidelines in the first of a series of articles about preflighting with InDesign.

I remember the face of the guy working in the service bureau I used most when I told him I was going to use InDesign. Sweat pouring off his face that had assumed the typical white coloration of someone who just saw the scariest thing in his life. Turning over to me on his swivel chair he said in panic: “Why don’t you just stick with Quark? You don’t know how many prepress problems you are going to run into with InDesign!”

Well, he wasn’t quite sweating and he wasn’t quite white in his face, but his words here are almost verbatim. I kept using InDesign regardless and I have learned that really the reaons for many of those prepress problems are due to lack of basic prepress knowledge that is applicable to any layout software. The truth is that because QuarkXPress and Pagemaker didn’t support transparency, not many people, designers and prepress personnel alike had dealt with transparency problems as much.

I remember the service bureau initially didn’t even want me to send them InDesign made PDFs because they were so worried about having to fix things up, that they wouldn’t have known how to meet the tough schedules often required by my jobs. The point is, things should not need to be fixed up.

After a first period of being completely thrown off by the differences between QuarkXPress and InDesign, I managed learn how to deal with Adobe’s layout application and transparency in a way that didn’t create any problems. Soon the service bureau not only was feeling comfortable with my InDesign files–aside from learning how to deal with InDesign files in general–but they also now preferred PDFs because they were so trouble-free and quick to process.

The moral? InDesign’s transparency isn’t evil, just misunderstood, and so is the PDFX/1-a standard. Aside from transparency there are many other things to watch for when preflighting a file and this is what we will cover in the rest of this article.