Going to Press Efficiently

These best InDesign preflight practices will save you time and money.

InDesign has many uses, some of them surprising. For many, InDesign long ago replaced PowerPoint as a slide show creator—just export pages cum slide deck to PDF, and use Acrobat’s or Adobe Reader’s built-in presentation features to display it to an audience. Many print-turned-Web-designers are using InDesign to wireframe, or sketch, Web sites. Features that allow embedding of multimedia, such as QuickTime movies and sounds, and interactive elements, like buttons with rollovers and actions, have positioned InDesign as the tool of choice for developing rich user experience PDFs. Thanks to innovations in CS4, InDesign is even catching up to its main competitor as the non-Flash-savvy-user’s Flash content creation tool.

All of these uses, whether expected or not, are a testament to the versatility and ease of use of InDesign. They also attest to the expansion of even traditional print design workflows toward electronic publishing. Still, despite the Web, PDF, and Flash, the main purpose for which the majority of us employ InDesign is to create materials destined to become ink on paper.

It’s startling, though, how little information there is on the subject of going to press these days. I don’t mean how to use InDesign’s Print dialog or why you should use CMYK instead of RGB color swatches. I’m referring to best practices for going to press. My friend Sandee Cohen recently mentioned that she’d met a woman who, within the last five years, had graduated college with a graphic design degree—which included at least one full year learning in InDesign—but without any instructor ever having defined the word “prepress” or having explained how layouts get from InDesign to ink on substrate!

Some people don’t even know why they should avoid the default and undeletable Registration color swatch; someone once said, “Don’t use it,” so they don’t use it, without knowing why.

In this edition of InTime, I’ll try to fill a few of those gaps. Hopefully even seasoned pressmen with ink embedded beneath their fingernails will find something herein to take away. And, I hope they’ll write in and share some of their wisdom and time tested prepress truisms and techniques with me, so I can pass along that information in a future InTime.

Consult the Wizard of Press

I’m often asked for my recommendation on the very best resource to give a designer the information she needs to send InDesign documents to press efficiently, with the best quality, highest color fidelity, fewest errors, and the least expense. Have you wondered the same thing? If so, you might be surprised by my answer because it isn’t this magazine, a book, Web site, or industry guru. Nor is the best resource Adobe itself.

The single most important resource you can consult regarding your InDesign (or any) for-print project is the printer who will output it for you. Your printer knows all, your printer sees all, your printer prints all. He can tell you more about your specific document, how to format this and configure that, than any of the gurus in this magazine. Why? Because we’re not RIPping and printing your job. We can give you general advice, specific techniques we’ve learned over the years, even best practices that will serve you in many, perhaps even most, situations, but not one of us can tell you precisely what will happen to your specific document when it goes to a particular print shop’s prepress and then press stages. The only one who can is the person who takes work like yours and processes it day in and day out on those very prepress and press systems.

So what should you ask your printer? Everything. Pardon the banality of this, but it needs to be said: The only dumb question is the one unasked. No matter how much or how little experience you have in print design and working with print providers, every printer worth hiring will be happy to educate you about his shop’s unique processes, tell you what to do in InDesign (and other applications), to ensure that your job prints to the highest quality possible, on time, with the least amount of stress for you and the printer’s personnel. If there’s something you don’t know about the printing process, how to prepare your files for press, how the printer wants them delivered, ask.

Then, after you deliver your project, go visit the printer if possible. Watch the job RIPping and printing. Do press checks—examining printed examples of your job as they roll off the press to ensure output as expected. Ask more questions.

Decide Before You Design

Before you can choose File > New Document you must make crucial decisions about the content and output of your printed design. The below, used as a checklist, can help you ask yourself and your print provider the right questions, make the right decisions, and begin your project already halfway to producing a top quality InDesign document efficiently before you’ve even launched InDesign.

Files to Get

Before you begin each project, ask your printer for the files listed below. The printer will have at least some of them ready, though you may not need the rest, depending upon your output options and file delivery methods.

There is No Generic Color Profile

If I had a dollar for every time I’m asked for the best color profile for “general use” I’d probably own Adobe Systems by now (and I’d have built in an option to hide that darn Registration color swatch). There is no best, ideal, default, or generic general use setting when it comes to sending documents to press. There are guidelines, though. For example, most printers in North America are used to receiving documents and images saved with the U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v1 CMYK color profile (part of the North America General Purpose 2 preset in Creative Suite). That’s actually strange, because most printing is done on sheetfed presses, not web presses. If you’re printing to sheetfed, consider using the Coated GRACoL 2006 profile, which ships with CS4, as it will likely give you better results.

But these kinds of guidelines are if you don’t know have an accurate picture of how a document will be printed (which actual printing press, which inks, which paper, and so on). If you can find those things out, you could use a color profile generated specifically for that particular output device. The point of color management is that there are no typical settings. Every device renders color differently, and the entire purpose of color managing a file is to target your document’s colors to a specific device’s unique color rendering characteristics.

Where do you get the color profile for your output device? Your printer. A good printer profiles his output devices, generating custom ICC profiles. They should gladly send them to you free, and then, with a properly calibrated monitor, you can be confident that what you see on screen is pretty darn close what you’ll see in print.

White Isn’t Always White

To paraphrase Bruce Willis in the Last Boy Scout, we all know that water’s wet, the sky’s blue, and paper is white, right? Well, no, not always. Frozen water isn’t wet, the sky changes color, and so does paper. Some white paper is whiter or brighter than others. Thus, not only will the unprinted “white” of your jobs differ from one stock to the next, so will the colors of your inks because the color of the paper will mix with them, tinting them (Figure 1). For that reason, you should proof your work from time to time onscreen using a color profile targeted not only to a particular output device but also to the specific substrate you’ve chosen. Once you have it (from your printer again), here’s how to use it.

Changing the options in the Customize Proof Condition dialog automatically turns on color proofing. To turn it off, just toggle the View > Proof Colors command.

Use Best of Breed Printers

Like designers, printers tend to specialize in certain areas. A printer who cranks out the most beautiful magazines, catalogs, and brochures may not be equipped to do the best job on your promotional posters, business cards, or signage. Some may not print jobs outside their specialties at all, others will offer “full service printing” to augment their primary projects income or as a convenience to clients who need something outside the norm once in a while. Many of both types will vend out the job to other printers. This is particularly true of the highly specialized business card printing business. Few print shops actually do business cards; most vend them out to a handful of boutique business card printers. And, sometimes, you can get better quality and price by cutting out the middle man.

Unless you’re always producing the same types of printed projects, establish a stable of print vendors and vend to them only the jobs at which they excel in producing. That said, cultivate relationships with your printers. Gifts help. Bruce Fraser, the late co-author of Real World Photoshop, recommended offering a “pint of Haagen-Dazs sorbet or, for really big favors, Laphroiag.”

Why You Shouldn’t Use Registration Color

As we all know, the InDesign Swatches panel includes four undeletable swatches. Their names are bracketed and three of them have an obvious purpose—None is no color; Black is black; Paper is effectively no color, allowing the color of the paper or substrate to shine through or knockout ink. The fourth undeletable swatch is Registration, and, surprisingly, not many people know what it’s for, just that they should never use it for any object to appear on the printed page unless instructed by their printer.

Simply put, the Registration color is a magic swatch that will print on every ink plate. If you’re working strictly in CMYK, any object set in 100% Registration will print out at 100% of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. If that’s cool to you, think again. The result is usually not a nice rich black but rather the color of old mud. Worse, ink is tacky and that much of it aggregating in too large of a place will make your printer very unhappy. If you’re working in CYMK and two spot colors, your Registration-colored object will print out in six colors. (That’s even uglier.)

So what is the point of the Registration swatch? To create such things as registration marks, those little cross hairs that enable press workers to identify when one or more colors don’t match up, indicating that something is misaligned on the printing press. The color is also used for other information or structures that need to print on all plates—usually in the slug area—such as the client name, job number, and other specific information. The easiest way to include that information on the film is to set it in the slug area, in the Registration color swatch.

PDF or INDD?

Most prepress pros are firmly in favor of sending only PDFs to the printer. Many printers are firmly in favor of you sending them the native InDesign document (packaged to include images and fonts). So which is correct? Send the PDF first. After all, the most common prepress problems, such as font embedding issues, alteration of trap and overprint settings, can be fixed directly in the PDF. That’s a whole lot better than the printer opening your file and possibly introducing accidental major changes like text reflow. But be prepared to package and send the InDesign file if the print shop insists on it.

Multiple Instances of Spot Colors

Working in a layout application like InDesign you often combine image assets from various sources, even different decades, into a single document. Well, if you haven’t noticed, ink libraries differ from application to application, one time period to another. An EPS image exported 10 years ago from QuarkXPress may contain a PANTONE color with a slightly different name than the same color added into the Photoshop PSD file last week. Placing both images into InDesign will bring in that same color as two separate color swatches— and it will output them as two separate color plates, doubling the cost and work involved in printing that one color.

How do you resolve such a situation? You can’t delete one swatch and replace it with the other, not if the spot color is part of a linked image. Should you pull the EPS into Illustrator or PSD into Photoshop and fix the mismatched ink there? Sure, you could, if you’re comfortable with those applications, but it’s not the most efficient way to fix the problem—particularly if you have multiple assets using the same conflicting spot colors. Instead, configure InDesign to overcome the problem internally, at print or export time.

The first ink is now aliased or mapped to the second. All instances of either spot color will now output on the same plate, as the same ink.

Time and Money

Going to press efficiently—which includes preparing to design the right way—will save you time and expense. Maybe we should call this column InTime and InExpense? I’ll bring you more tips and techniques for going to press efficiently in future installments of InTime. In the meantime, open the April/May 2009 issue of this magazine for some great related advice from Steve Werner in “Will it Print? 10 Tips for Creating an InDesign File that Prints Perfectly.”

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