Adobe Creative Suite 4 Printing Guide
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1. Choose File > Adobe PDF Presets > Define.
2. Choose the appropriate preset for a starting point.
3. Click the New button, and name the preset.
4. To modify the bleed settings, choose Marks and Bleeds, and set the appropriate bleed amount
for your workflow. It is not sufficient to check the option to Use Document Bleed Settings. If a
document has been set up with zero bleed, the resulting PDF will be without bleed. Rather, set
the bleed amount to an appropriate number (usually 0.125 in).
5. Choose any printer’s marks you wish to add.
6. Click OK to save the PDF preset
7. To save the PDF preset as a file for another workstation or a customer, choose File > Adobe
PDF Presets > Define, select the preset in the list, and click the Save As button. Give the preset
a brief name (InDesign adds the extension .joboptions to the name), and save the preset.
8. To load a PDF preset, choose File > Adobe PDF Presets > Define and click the Load button.
Navigate to the supplied file and click Open. The preset is added to the list of available presets
in InDesign, and is then also available to other Creative Suite 4 applications.
In addition to the PDF/X presets, InDesign also includes the following default PDF creation
presets: Smallest File Size, High Quality Print, and Press Quality. For details of specific features
of the default PDF presets in Creative Suite 4 applications, see the “Common Resources” chapter.
Exporting PDFs versus Distilling
Despite some urban myths to the contrary, exported PDFs and distilled PDFs are equally compli-
ant. You may find that distilling creates a slightly smaller file size in some cases, but you will also
find that InDesign CS4 creates much smaller exported PDFs than previous versions of InDesign
did. Exporting PDFs offers the advantage of speed and maintains live transparency, as well as
features such as hyperlinks, bookmarks, and multimedia. Using Adobe Distiller requires two
steps: first, generating PostScript, and then processing that PostScript through Distiller. But keep
in mind that generating PostScript will flatten transparency, possibly limiting later editing.
Printing from InDesign
The comprehensive range of InDesign options lets you precisely customize print settings for your
shop’s workflow. Once you’ve determined the best combinations of settings for the devices in
your shop, save those combinations as print presets. You may then be able to run many of your
jobs simply by choosing a preset from the Printer Preset menu at the top of the Print dialog box.
Your shop’s goal should be to prepare print presets for the most common types of output so that
InDesign files print easily and consistently. You can change all printer options—such as page size
and color profiles—from the Print dialog box.
Print settings are independently maintained for each document, so that each document can
preserve its own settings.
The print dialog box: Common areas
In the Print dialog box, the only area that changes is that containing options specific to each
panel. All other areas of the Print dialog box are common areas that remain visible regardless
of the panel you are viewing. In the interest of consistency, options that don’t apply in a certain
workflow are dimmed, not removed. If an option is dimmed, but its label is not, the option does
apply but it can’t be changed.
Print Preset:
If you have created or imported any custom print presets, choose from this
pop-up menu.
Printer:
Choose the appropriate target printer from this menu, which is populated with cur-
rently installed printer drivers. You can also opt to create a PostScript file.
PPD:
(PostScript Printer Description) The choices are determined by the current Printer menu
setting. When you select a PostScript printer in the Printer menu, the PPD menu will display the
name of PPD that was set up with that printer by the printer driver. Note that you cannot select
another PPD; this guards against assigning a PPD other than the one properly set up with a par-
ticular device. If you want to create a PostScript file targeted to a PPD for a printer not connected
