In an earlier posting, we pointed out that you can use Separation Preview in Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Acrobat to detect problems like having multiple versions of a spot color.

So how can you fix problems like this? In Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat, you can do this in the Ink Manager. In InDesign, you’ll choose Ink Manager on the panel menu of the Swatches panel or the Separations Preview panel. In Acrobat X Pro, choose Tools > Print Production > Ink Manager. In Acrobat 9 Pro, choose Advanced > Print Production > Ink Manager.

There are two primary fixes that this tool can fix. It can convert unnecessary spot colors to process, and it can alias one spot color to another.

When you view your inks in the Separation Preview dialog, if you find you have extra spot colors that you don’t want your printer to print as separate plates (which can get expensive), click in the left column beside their name. Those colors will be converted to print as process color (CMYK) inks.

If you have two inks which you want to print on the same spot color plate (e.g., PANTONE 187C and PANTONE 187U), you can use the dialog to alias one to the other. Select one of the inks and choose the name of the other from the Ink Alias menu.

In the early days of digital printing (what was then sometimes called “desktop publishing”) it was difficult for a print service provider to be able to know how a file that was submitted by a customer would print as color separations.

You could see the colors on-screen, but you couldn’t easily tell if they had specified additional ink colors that would print out on extra printing plates. So we would painfully print out separations on the laser printer in the shop.

These days, if you’re using Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, or Adobe Acrobat Pro, it’s much easier. You can use a feature usually called Separation Preview. In InDesign, choose Window > Output > Separation Preview. In Illustrator, choose Window > Separations Preview. In Acrobat X Pro, choose Tools > Print Production > Output Preview and look at the Separations pane.

You’ll see the color plates of your document as they would print out. If you move your cursor over the page, you can see the color value of the current location. 

It’s particularly helpful to discover if you have more than one color specified that should be on the same color plate. In the illustration below the PANTONE 187 should be on one plate but shows up on two because the names of the plates are different.
 

It can save a lot of time and money to discover these problems ahead of time, before they slow things down on the printing press.

Sometimes a person writes that they have been asked to outline fonts by a printer. Or they think that if the person they’re sending a file to doesn’t have the fonts used in a PDF document, that other fonts will be substituted.

If you create a PDF file from your document, all the Adobe Creative Suite applications (and most other applications) will embed all the fonts. Outlining in almost all cases is not necessary.

There are some good reasons not to outline fonts:

• The outlining of text will degrade the typographic quality of the text. The glyphs are turned into ordinary graphics that lack the intelligence fonts have (called hinting) to look good on different kinds of printers. Look at the word “blanket” below after it has been outlined. Outlined type will look thicker.

• Certain attributes will be lost because they are not part of the font itself. The underscore in the URL below below was lost, and the words in the bulleted list were outlined but the bullets were not.

So the best advice is: Keep type in its native format. Resist outlining if possible.

There are many things that can go wrong when sending a file to be printed, but many of these things are preventable. For example, you could have a text frame that is overset and doesn’t show all of the words in a story. Or you could have placed a picture that was low resolution and doesn’t print well.

InDesign CS4 and later versions come to the rescue. It includes a Live Preflight feature that finds errors and saves you time and money. It’s constantly checking your file for the criteria included in the preflight profile that is chosen. This is shown in the Preflight panel (choose Window > Output > Preflight to view it). By default, Live Preflight uses a [Basic] profile that only searches for a couple things like overset text, or missing fonts or graphics.

But you can customize it to find more mistakes. If possible, the best preflight profile might be one provided by your commercial printer. You can load it into the panel, and search for things that are incompatible with their workflow. But, if you’re an experienced prepress person, you can customize one yourself for the problems that you frequently encounter.

If you don’t have the expertise to create your own, the VIGC, the Flemish Innovation Center for Graphic Communication, provides a number of free preflight profiles on their website which work with InDesign CS4 or CS5. These are profiles that are designed for different segments of the graphic industry.

A frequent problem for users of graphic arts applications is that you may mistakenly open up your file in the wrong application, or in the wrong version of the application. For example, you may have more than one version of Adobe InDesign on your computer. When you double-click on an InDesign file, the operating system determines which version opens the file, but that is often not the version you want to open the file in.

Another example: You’re working with PDF or EPS files. These files can be opened in more than one application. For example, you may want an Illustrator-created EPS file to open in Illustrator, and a Photoshop-created EPS file to open in Photoshop.

Rorohiko’s Soxy application provides an answer. Soxy automatically determines the type of each file you open and then directs it to the most appropriate application. You can set up the rules that Soxy follows when opening up a file by double-clicking on the Soxy application, and using its window controls.

In the window shown, you can see that there are three different applications which can open up a PDF file on this computer, and you can choose your preferred application, or you can set up the option to be prompted to select one. Soxy is available for both Macintosh and Windows computers. Contact Rorohiko at http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/downloads/lightning-brain-soxy/ for more information.