Indesign 2.0 part 2

Incredibly, Adobe's Acrobat and its Portable Document Format have been with us almost ten years. Despite such humble beginnings, the PDF is now an essential instrument for placing format-rich documents on the Web, as well as generating documents for print. In this tutorial, we're focusing on the PDF's latter strengths. The benefits are obvious - creating one compact selfcontained document, with all fonts, scans and logos embedded, rather than a plethora of individual files (think possible re-runs, font substitution, corrupt images, and so forth).

We've included a brief overview of Enfocus PitStop to show how you can 'beef up' the preflighting of your PDFs, catching problems such as low-res images and LAB colour that InDesign's own preflighting would otherwise miss.

We've chosen the imagery for this tutorial carefully - start merrily producing PDFs without checking the content at your peril. Follow the triedand- tested methods coming up, though, and they'll go a long way to assuring dependable results. Talk to your service provider and ask them what settings you should use, and always remember to sign off a digital proof - preferably pre-RIP'd and guaranteed to be the final printed version.

This tutorial can be found in issue 78 of Computer Arts , Winter 2002. To order a copy, please contact backissues@futurenet.co.uk. For more expert tutorials on 3D, Web and Photoshop, plus interactive CD ROM, subscribe for 13 issues here.

Download the tutorial pdf here and accompanying files below.