Adobe Creative Suite 4
Printing Guide
Introduction
Welcome to the Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Printing Guide. Adobe is dedicated to provid-
ing software that allows designers to express their visual ideas, while providing tools
and resources to printers to ensure that those ideas print as intended. While designers
explore the creative features of Adobe Photoshop® CS4, Adobe InDesign® CS4, and
Adobe Illustrator® CS4, as well as the capabilities of Acrobat® 9 Pro, printers need to
take a rather different approach. You might call it “reverse engineering”: inspecting,
analyzing, and, if necessary, modifying customer files to facilitate printing. While this
document is focused on the needs and requirements of printers, it is also useful for
production artists who are preparing files for print.
Some modifications (for example, replacing solid black areas with a rich black build, or
converting RGB text to black-only) are dictated by the physical requirements of print-
ing. Some tweaks may be necessary to accommodate a particular raster image proces-
sor (RIP) or imaging device. Not all workflows are the same, and solutions vary accord-
ingly. Regardless of your particular workflow, the more you know about the tools used
by designers to create files, the better equipped you are to anticipate, prevent, find, and
fix problems. In addition, you’ll be better able to advise your customers as they prepare
files for submission.
What This Guide Is Intended to Do
This guide serves as both a detailed technical reference for handling Creative Suite 4
files from your customers, and as a training tool for your staff.
For example, this guide will introduce you to forensic tools, such as the Overprint
Preview option in Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat 9 Pro, as well as the Output
Preview function in Acrobat, all of which are invaluable in highlighting potential
problems. The earlier you can pinpoint problems in a job, the less expensive and com-
plicated they are to rectify.
As RIPs have matured and transparency flattening has become more sophisticated,
there are fewer issues with jobs containing transparency. The advent of pure PDF
workflows based on the Adobe PDF Print Engine will result in more reliable reproduc-
tion of PDF content—that is, greater consistency and fidelity to the designer’s intent.
For example, transparency effects in InDesign CS4, such as gradient feather, glow, and
inner shadow effects, image without the need for flattening when output through a PDF
Print Engine-based RIP. You’ll find guidance in this document for identifying such
effects and for preparing jobs to correctly render them during output. Additionally,
you’ll find links to other available reference materials that cover such topics in depth.
How This Guide Is Structured
Some technologies and concepts—such as PDF creation, transparency, and the Adobe
Graphics Model—are common across the Adobe products used for print design and
production in Creative Suite 4 Design Premium, Design Standard or Master Collection.
You’ll find information about such topics in the “Common Resources” chapter.
This document is organized so that you can quickly find information about specific
software. As a job enters production in a printing plant, its path varies according to the
conventions of the particular plant, as well as the requirements of the job. But because
many jobs involve the aggregation of artwork and text in an InDesign layout, it makes
sense to treat InDesign as a “hub,” and Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat as related
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction
3 Chapter 1: Common Resources
16 Chapter 2: Adobe InDesign CS4
55 Chapter 3: Adobe Photoshop CS4 and
Photoshop CS4 Extended
73 Chapter 4: Adobe Illustrator CS4
95 Chapter 5: Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro
