Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible

The Print dialog box has many panes ‚ eight, to be precise ‚ as well as several options common to all the panes. Change any options and choose Print, and InDesign sends your document to the printer. Figure 31-1 shows the dialog box.

Figure 31-1: The default view for the Print dialog box.

Tip ‚  

If you're working with the InDesign Books feature (see Chapter 9), you can print the book's chapters from an open book's pane, using the Print Book option in its palette menu. (If one or more documents in the book are selected in the pane, the menu option will change to Print Selected Documents.) The setup options are the same as for printing individual documents.

General options

The general options available in the dialog box, no matter what pane is selected, are as follows :

The General pane

The General pane (refer to Figure 31-1) contains the basic settings for your print job:

The Setup pane

The Setup pane, shown in Figure 31-3, is where you tell InDesign how to work with the paper (or other media, such as film negatives ) that you're printing to. The options are straightforward.

Figure 31-3: The Setup pane.

Paper size and orientation

In the Paper Size section, choose the paper size using the Paper Size pop-up menu. You can also check the page orientation using any of the four buttons, which rotate the image as follows from left to right: 0 degrees (standard portrait), ‚ 90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 90 degrees (standard landscape).

Choosing some printer models will in turn let you choose a Custom option in the Page Size pop-up menu, in which case you enter the dimensions in the Width and Height fields, as well as position the output via the Offset and Gap fields. These latter two options are usually used when printing to a roll, such as in an imagesetter using photo paper (called RC paper, a resin-coated paper that keeps details extremely sharp), so you can make sure there is space between the left edge of the roll and the page boundary (the Offset ), as well as between pages (the Gap ). Most printers can't print right to the edge, thus the Offset setting; you also want a Gap between pages for crop and registration marks, as well as to have room to physically cut the pages.

The Transverse check box, if checked, will rotate the output 90 degrees. This is done mainly for imagesetters , whose paper and film negatives are usually about 12 inches wide. At that width, it's cheaper for the service bureau to rotate the pages 90 degrees in most cases (since most publications are usually no taller than 11 inches), packing more pages onto the RC paper or film.

Caution ‚  

Many service bureaus use a utility program that automatically rotates pages to save film, so check with your service bureau to make sure that checking the Transverse option won't conflict with any rotation they might do. Also, if you specify a larger paper size to make room for bleeds or because your document will be printed at tabloid size, this rotation might cause the tops and/or bottoms of your document pages to be cut off. The basic rule: Discuss all output settings with your service bureau or prepress department first.

Scaling, positioning, and tiling options

The Setup pane also lets you set scaling, positioning, and tiling settings.

The Scale settings are straightforward. You can choose separate Width and Height scalings to reduce or enlarge the page image. If Constrain Proportions is checked, then a change in the Width field is applied to the Height field, and vice versa. To make a page fit the paper size, choose the Scale to Fit radio button. InDesign will then display the actual percentage it will use. Note that Scale to Fit takes into account bleeds and crop marks, so even if the document page size is the same as the output device's paper size, Scale to Fit will reduce it to make room for those elements.

The Page Position pop-up menu lets you choose how the page image is positioned on the paper you're printing to. The default is Centered, which centers the page image vertically and horizontally. You can also choose Center Horizontally, which aligns the top of the page image to the top of the paper and centers the page horizontally; Center Vertically, which aligns the left side of the page to the left side of the paper and centers the page vertically; and Upper Left, which places the page image's upper-left corner at the paper's upper-left corner.

Caution ‚  

These three positioning options ‚ Center Horizontally, Center Vertically, and Top Left ‚ run the risk of putting part of the page outside the printer's imaging margin ‚ a strip of a pica or so from the paper edge in which the printer cannot print. That's why it's best to use the default Page Position setting of Centered when printing to paper, such as from an ink-jet, laser, or thermal wax printer. This option also makes room available on all sides where possible for crop marks and bleeds.

Caution ‚  

But when you print to an imagesetter or platesetter, Centered may not be the best option. Your service bureau may not want the pages centered, because they may be spacing them or rotating them to minimize wastage of paper or film negatives. Imagesetters output to rolls of paper or film, so the service bureau has some control over the page's size. Always check first. On a local laser printer or other proofing device that outputs discrete pages, go ahead and use this option to make room available on all sides where possible for crop marks and bleeds.

A very nice option is InDesign's Thumbnails check box and its adjoining pop-up menu. Here, you can have InDesign print thumbnails ‚ miniature versions of pages, several to a sheet ‚ for use in presenting comps, seeing whole articles at a glance, and so on. If you check the Thumbnails option, you then select how many thumbnails you want per page from the adjoining pop-up menu. Your choices are 1x2, 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, 6x6, and 7x7. InDesign will size the pages based on what it takes to make them fit at the number of thumbnails chosen per page, the page size, and the paper size.

QuarkXPress User ‚  

InDesign's Thumbnails option is more flexible than QuarkXPress's, letting you choose the umber of thumbnails per page.

Use the Tile options to print oversized documents. InDesign will break the document into separate pages ‚ called tiles ‚ that you later can assemble together. To enable tiling, check the Tile option. Then choose the appropriate option from the adjoining pop-up menu:

The Marks and Bleeds pane

The Marks and Bleeds pane, shown in Figure 31-4, lets you specify which printer marks are output with your pages, as well as areas to reserve for items that bleed off the page. The printer's marks are set in the Marks section, while the bleeds are set in the Bleed and Slug section.

Figure 31-4: The Marks and Bleeds pane.

Printer's marks

In most cases, you'd select All Printer's Marks and have all print on each sheet or negative. But you can select which ones you want to print. Here's what each option means:

Bleeds and slugs

The Bleed and Slug area of the Setup pane controls how materials print past the page boundary.

A bleed is used when you want a picture, color, or text to go right to the edge of the paper. Because there is slight variation on positioning when you print, since the paper moves mechanically through rollers and might move slightly during transit, publishers have any to-the-edge materials actually print beyond the edge, so there are never any gaps. It's essentially a safety margin. A normal bleed margin would be 0p9 (0.75 inch), though you can make it larger if you want.

A slug is an area beyond the bleed area in which you want printer's marks to appear. The reader will never see this, but the staff at the commercial printer will, to help them make sure they have the right pages, colors, and so on. Like the bleed, the slug area is trimmed off when the pages are bound into a magazine, newspaper, or whatever. (The word slug is an old newspaper term for this identifying information, based on the lead slug once used for this purpose on old printing presses.) The purpose is to ensure there is enough room for all the printer's marks to appear between the bleed area and the edges of the page. Otherwise, InDesign will do the best it can.

It's best to define your bleed and slug areas in your document itself when you create the document in the New Document dialog box (File ‚ New, or z +N or Ctrl+N), as covered in Chapter 4. You can also use the Document Setup dialog box (File ‚ Document Setup, or Option+ z +P or Ctrl+Alt+P). The two dialog boxes have the same options; if they don't show the Bleed and Slug section, click the More Options button to see them.

But if you didn't define your bleeds previously, you can do so in the Print dialog box's Marks and Bleed pane. You can also override those document settings here. To use the document settings, check the Use Document Bleed Settings option. Otherwise, enter in a bleed area using the Top, Bottom, Left, and Right fields. If you want them to be the same, click the broken-chain icon to the right of the Top field; it will become a solid chain, indicating that all four fields will have the same value if any is modified. Any bleed area will be indicated in red in the preview pane at the bottom-left.

If you want to set the slug area, check the Include Slug Area option. InDesign will then reserve any slug area defined in the New Document or Document Setup dialog box. You cannot set up the slug area in the Print dialog box.

New Feature ‚  

The Include Slug Area option is new to InDesign CS, since slugs are new to this version.

The Output pane

The next pane is the Output pane, which controls the processing of colors and inks on imagesetters, platesetters, and commercial printing equipment. You'll definitely want to check these settings with your service bureau. For proof printing, such as to a laser printer or ink-jet printer, the only option that you'll need to worry about is the Color pop-up menu. Figure 31-5 shows the pane.

Figure 31-5: The Output pane.

Caution ‚  

These options should be specified in coordination with your service bureau and commercial printer ‚ they can really mess up your printing if set incorrectly.

Here's what the options do:

What "lpi" and "dpi" mean

Lines per inch (lpi) and dots per inch (dpi) are not related because the spots in a line screen are variable-sized, while dots in a laser printer or imagesetter are often fixed- sized . (Because newer printers using techniques like Hewlett-Packard's Resolution Enhancement Technology or Apple Computer's FinePrint and PhotoGrade use variable-sized dots, the distinction may disappear one day.)

Lines per inch specifies, in essence, the grid through which an image is filtered, not the size of the spots that make it up. Dots per inch specifies the number of ink dots per inch produced by the laser printer; these dots are typically the same size. A 100-lpi image with variable sized dots will, therefore, appear finer than a 100-dpi image. The figure shows an example, with a fixed-dot arrow at left and a variable-size -dot arrow at right.

Depending upon the size of the line-screen spot, several of a printer's fixed-sized dots may be required to simulate one line-screen spot. For this reason, a printer's or imagesetter's lpi is far less than its dpi. For example, a 300-dpi laser printer can achieve about 60-lpi resolution; a 1,270-dpi imagesetter can achieve about 120-lpi resolution; a 2,540-dpi imagesetter about 200-lpi resolution. Resolutions of less than 100 lpi are considered coarse, and resolutions of more than 120 lpi are considered fine.

But there's more to choosing an lpi setting than knowing your output device's top resolution. An often overlooked issue is the type of paper the material is printed on. Smoother paper (such as glossy-coated or super-calendared) can handle finer halftone spots because the paper's coating (also called its finish) minimizes ink bleeding. Standard office paper, such as that used in photocopiers and laser printers, is rougher and has some bleed that is usually noticeable only if you write on it with markers. Newsprint is very rough and has a heavy bleed. Typically, newspaper images are printed at 85 to 90 lpi; newsletter images on standard office paper print at 100 to 110 lpi; magazine images are printed at 120 to 150 lpi; calendars and coffee-table art books are printed at 150 to 200 lpi.

Other factors affecting lpi include the type of printing press and the type of ink used. Your printer representative should advise you on preferred settings.

If you output your document from your computer directly to film negatives (rather than to photographic paper that is then shot to create negatives), inform your printer representative. Outputting to negatives allows a higher lpi than outputting to paper because negatives created photographically cannot accurately reproduce the fine resolution that negatives that output directly on an imagesetter have. (If, for example, you output to 120 lpi on paper and then create a photographic negative, even the slightest change in the camera's focus will make the fine dots blurry. Outputting straight to negatives avoids this problem.) Printer representatives often assume that you're outputting to paper and base their advised lpi settings on this assumption.

 

The Graphics pane

The Graphics pane, shown in Figure 31-6, controls how graphics are printed, as well as how fonts are downloaded. The options here are meant for professional printing, such as to imagesetters, in situations where you're working with a service bureau or in-house printing department.

Figure 31-6: The Graphics pane.

Your first option is the Send Data pop-up menu, in the Images section. It has three additional options: All, Optimized Subsampling, and Proxy (a low-resolution , 72-dpi version), and None. Typically, use All. The other two options are meant to increase speed of proof prints, with Proxy being the fastest . The None option is handy for quick proofs meant to focus on the layout and the text.

The Download options in the Font section require that you understand how your output device is configured to handle fonts. Be sure to ask your service bureau what options it prefers:

Finally, you can specify what PostScript language is used and how PostScript data is transmitted. Although you set these up in the Mac OS and Windows printer settings (refer to Figure 31-2), InDesign gives you the opportunity to override any defaults here, which can be handy when creating output files for printing elsewhere. From the PostScript pop-up menu, you can choose Level 2 or Level 3; use whichever the output device supports. (Most still use Level 2.) The Data Format pop-up menu is grayed out unless you chose PostScript File in the Printer pop-up menu; your choices are ASCII and Binary. If you choose ASCII, the PostScript file is more likely to be editable in programs like Adobe Illustrator, but the file will be larger. Ask your service bureau which it prefers.

The Color Management pane

The Color Management pane, shown in Figure 31-7, is where you manage color output (apply color calibration). The options are straightforward:

Figure 31-7: The Color Management pane.

The Advanced pane

The options in the Advanced pane, shown in Figure 31-8, control graphics file substitutions in an Open Prepress Interface (OPI) workflow and also set transparency flattening, which controls how transparent and semitransparent objects are handled during output.

Figure 31-8: The Advanced pane.

If graphics files exist in high-resolution versions at your service bureau ‚ typically, this occurs when the bureau scans in photographs at very high resolutions and sends you a lower-resolution version for layout placement ‚ check the OPI Image Replacement option. This will ensure that InDesign uses the high-resolution scans instead of the low-resolution layout versions.

A related graphics-file-handling option are the three check boxes in the Omit for OPI section: You can have InDesign not send EPS, PDF, and bitmap images (such as TIFF files) by checking the appropriate options. You would do so either to speed printing of proof copies, or when the service bureau will have such files in higher-resolution or color-corrected versions and will substitute their graphics for yours. InDesign will keep any OPI links, so the graphics at the service bureau will relink to your document during output.

There are just two Transparency Flattener options:

The Summary pane

The final Print dialog box pane is the Summary pane, shown in Figure 31-9. It simply lists your settings all in one place for easy review. The only option ‚ Save Summary ‚ saves the settings to a file so you can include it with your files when delivering them to a service bureau, or for distribution to other staff members so they know the preferred settings.

Figure 31-9: The Summary pane.

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