Pre-flighting, PDF creation and holiday notice

Welcome to the last newsletter for the year. It’s assumed nobody will read an email between Christmas and New Years!

Holiday Notice

Before delving into new publishing workflows, first a note on D Revolution’s holiday plans.
D Revolution will be on holidays from Thursday 3rd of December and will return Thursday 10th December.
We will be available through Christmas and the new year.
If you need help with PC support, contact David Mews on 0404 067 111 or email [email protected]
If you need help with Mac support, contact David Stone on 0414 310 999 or email [email protected]
Clients with the D Revolution remote access ie; the Netgear DGFV338 router will be able to get remote support for their entire network via VPN – just schedule a time!

Correction of previous article

Back in a previous article on the 1st October I stated;
“The AdStream QuickPrint plug-in for InDesign CS4 cannot see any extra installed Colour profiles”
The issue is not the QuickPrint plugin but InDesign CS4 not seeing colour profiles stored in the default user library.
Thank to Marcus at QuickCut Support for pointing this out.
If you are having any QuickCut issues call them on 1300 768 988 or email [email protected]

Pre-flighting and PDF creation

Pre-flighting and correct layout creation

The majority of all artwork layout these days is created in an Adobe package and exported to a PDF for print production.
Whilst Adobe holds the lion’s share of layout software with InDesign, quite a few companies still use QuarkXpress.
With QuarkXpress 8 and Adobe InDesign 6 (CS4) there are new workflows to help with the creation of page layouts.
Adobe InDesign has introduced “Live Preflight” and Quark have refined their “Job Jackets”.

Both companies tackle the issue in different ways and at the moment, Adobe’s more visual method of flagging errors as they are produced (via a Preflight profile) takes the edge over QuarkXpress and setting up correct Job Jackets.

In Australia, the two big ad delivery platforms – AdStream and WebSend both have tools to aid in the creation of layouts to publisher’s specifications. Whilst these tools are invaluable in creating layouts to the correct mechanical specs like column size, type area,bleed etc… they don’t address the more common printing issues early enough in the layout process.

If you are an InDesign 6 user, a new initiative out of Belgium holds some promise.
The VICG have produced a set of freely available live preflight profile for InDesign.
Combined with PDF profiles produced by the Ghent Working Group, your workflow should produce less “surprises”
Call us if you need help evaluating this or other pre-flighting/PDF workflows.

I hope AdStream and WebSend take up the challenge and start producing live preflight profiles for the new AS/ISO 12647-2 print standard. This way, errors can be picked up during layout creation – not waiting till PDF production as is currently the case.

PDF Creation

For PDF creation, when in doubt, SPEAK TO YOUR PRINTER – they will often supply a PDF joboption.
If not, a good standby is to use the PDF/X-1a 2003 setting as recommended by 3dap. NOTE: InDesign CS3 has the older 2001 specs and should not be used.
A better approach is using the Ghent PDF profiles (which build on the PDF/X-1a standard) as mentioned earlier along with the supplied GWG transparency flatteners…
For Sheetfed (CMYK +spot) use SheetSpotHiRes
For Magazine (CMYK only) use WebCmykHiRes
For Newspapers (CMYK) use WebCmykNews
Call us if you need help setting up a PDF workflow.

If you know someone who might gain from this information, they can subscribe to the newsletter – here.