…and I shouldn’t HAVE to.

I’ve been sort of mentoring a woman who’s transitioning from marketing to doing freelance design work. Even though she didn’t train as a designer, she has very good instincts for what looks good, and she’s done a very good job of teaching herself InDesign; I just sort of fill in the blanks, and help her anticipate printing issues.

Currently, she’s designing a pocket folder with an 8-page stitched-in insert for a client whose budget dictates that the short-run job be printed at a nationally franchised quick-print place which shall remain nameless unless they keep being stupid. Then I will name them.

The digital printing revolution has made color printing available to individuals and small businesses who couldn’t afford long-run offset work. But the downside is that these places may be staffed by people who either don’t have any commercial printing background, or see the endeavor as a variation of “d’you want fries with that?”

She’s been asked to provide the 8-page 9″x12″ insert as four 18″x12″ single-page printer spreads. I made her call them and ask, “Do you have imposition software?”

“Uh, well, yeah…”

“So can’t I design in two-page reader spreads as Nature intended, and you can impose to the correct final pagination?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.”

What— is it that hard to crank up Preps or Quite Imposing, call up a standard 8-page saddle-stitch form, import the PostScript or PDF file, click OK, and eat a Twinkie? Shoot, you could just export PDFs, do homegrown imposition in InDesign and hit File>Print, for that matter.

The moral of this story? Don’t let counter jockeys buffalo you. And find a genuinely well-equipped digital printing place, such as Imagers in Atlanta. They’re professionals with the necessary background, plus a nice helping of Good Sense(TM), something apparently lacking in the place my friend is forced to deal with. And they do high-quality work at a reasonable price.

There. I feel better.

Because of the wide usage of direct-to-plate workflows, few printing companies are still outputting and manually stripping film, although I suppose it may be going on in the hinterlands. The only exception would be specialized printing processes, such as screen printing or metal etching. While registration marks and other locating marks are used on press to monitor ink alignment, those marks are usually generated by the imposition software that positions the pages for output, rather than the original page layout or illustration applications.

What color, exactly, is Registration? It’s all the inks used in the document: it’s 100% of all inks. So, in a job containing CMYK plus PMS 185, Registration would be C100-M100-Y100-K100 plus 100% PMS 185. This adds up to a whopping 500% ink coverage where Registration is used. This is not a press problem in isolated areas such as trim and registration marks, but such heavy ink coverage in larger areas would result in drying issues and other problems. And if there’s slight misregistration on press, you’ll get a bleary multicolored fringe:

This is exaggerated for dramatic effect, but it's still possible for thin fringes of color to spoil the look of the printed piece.

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Why do I bring this up? Because twice this week I encountered files built with Registration instead of plain old Black. If there had been just one element — say, a line of text — using Registration, I would have chalked it up to mis-clicking: aiming for Black, and accidentally hitting the next color in the list. But, no: in both cases, Registration had been used for all the text in the InDesign page, as well as artwork created in Illustrator. Clearly, it was intentional. But why?

My guess is that the designer thought plain old Black just wasn’t robust enough; maybe it looked anemic on their desktop printer. And it’s true that process black ink alone in large areas can look, well, gray rather than black: that’s why we use rich black builds in large areas. Registration is not an appropriate “rich black,” however!

If your design contains large bold black text (40 pt or above), or large solid black areas, consider using a rich black build (try C40-K100). Better yet, ask your printer what they’d recommend for a rich black recipe, as well as their advice on where to use it (i.e., text size or color area dimension).

I wish the applications wouldn’t even display Registration; maybe it should be a hidden color choice, available only from a subsidiary panel menu in the Swatches and Color panels. Until then, you’ll have to police yourself: don’t click there!

Why did I do this? So that I could handle customers’ PC files when they came into the printing plant. We had quickly learned that it wasn’t smart to try to move the files to the Mac: fonts didn’t translate, text reflowed, and things generally fell apart. It made more sense to keep the jobs in their native habitat.

In those long-ago days, PC designers were in the very small minority; that’s no longer the case. When I survey an audience these days, roughly 40% are PC users: the Mac monopoly on graphic arts is over. The predominant graphics programs — Adobe’s Creative Suite and QuarkXPress — are available on both platforms, PCs are often less expensive than Macs, and it’s easier to convince a corporate IT crew to let you get a PC than to bring a Mac into a Windows-only business environment.

In light of this, there’s no excuse for a printer to risk taking a file cross-platform because they either don’t own a PC, don’t have a prepress operator who knows how to use a PC, or because they think it doesn’t matter. None of those circumstances is excusable in the current marketplace.

Yet that’s what a printer recently did to a customer’s PC InDesign file. Not only did they open and resave the customer’s file on a Mac, they substituted Mac fonts for the PC fonts (not even the same fonts, for cryin’ out loud!), then returned the file to the customer. My customer can’t use the Mac PostScript fonts. Shoot, I couldn’t even use them on my Mac: they were corrupted, all weighing in at zero KB.

By the way, this is the same file that was “poisoned” by the XMPie plug-in in my earlier post. Poor file has really been through the wringer.

My advice to the customer is to have a stern conversation with the printer about file mistreatment, and to ask them if they have the capability to correctly handle PC files. If they don’t, then the customer will be forced to purchase OpenType versions of their preferred fonts. Then, at least their files will be safer regardless of sloppy and thoughtless file handling at the printer. Sheesh.

I’ve just received word that my book, “Real World Print Production” (Peachpit Press, 2006) is going to be revised. I’m pleased that Peachpit is going to let me update the book for current versions of software, and it will also give me the opportunity to expand some of the other content to reflect changes and growth in print and imaging technologies.

It all sounds like such fun now; check back when I’ve been up for 18 hours pounding the keyboard or staring at a stubborn paragraph

No ETA yet; I haven’t started pounding the keyboard. But I’m hoping to have it done by early Spring.

The PDF is fully bookmarked; open the Bookmarks panel (View>Navigation Panels>Bookmarks) to reveal the extensive list of hyperlinked topics. Additionally, the Table of Contents is hyperlinked to internal content, so it’s easy to find your way around.

Designers will find lots of useful content, too. You can select a low-res or high-res version of the 139-page guide, and you’ll also find the CS3 version of the printing guide on the same page. Both offer insights into print-specific features in the Suite applications, and provide cautions and workarounds for each application.

I’m proud to say that I’m responsible for both the CS3 and CS4 revisions, starting with the CS2 version and building on its content. Consequently, some of the content is legacy, some was contributed by other revisers during the early CS3 phase, but the final versions of both are my doing. It was a labor of love, and I’m proud of the finished pieces. I hope you find the guides a valuable resource.

Given recent upheaval at Adobe (600 layoffs yesterday, including some very dear friends), I don’t know if there will be more versions of this resource. If Adobe doesn’t spearhead an update for future CS versions (assuming there will be future CS versions, and I can’t imagine there won’t be), I’ll do it myself.

While InDesign can’t create trapped content, there is a way to create a trapped PDF from InDesign. For the job described, which requires “fattening up” all artwork, you must convince InDesign that it needs to spread the artwork. It looks long-winded when you see all the steps below, but it’s not really that bad. For this to happen, you need three things:
-artwork that’s lighter than the background (I’ll use C100 in this example). And your signature must be a bitmap TIFF. (OK, so maybe you actually need four things.)
-a custom trap preset in InDesign
-Distiller (if you don’t have Distiller, you can’t do this)

1. Turn your Illustrator artwork to 100 cyan, then update it in InDesign. Yes, I know it will emboss — not print in cyan — but it doesn’t matter what color it appears to be: they’ll output that plate and use it as the basis for an embossing die.
2. In InDesign, color your scanned signature 100 cyan: You can just drag the 100 cyan swatch on top of the signature frame without selecting the frame first. Alternatively, select the sig artwork with the white arrow, and choose the cyan swatch.
3. Change all your text to 100% cyan.
4. Create a big 100% black object behind everything. This creates a situation InDesign is willing to trap.

In InDesign, create a trap preset that spreads the art by whatever amount the printer suggested: let’s say .004″. (Max is .111″)

1. Go to Window>Output>Trap Presets
2. From the Trap panel menu, choose New Preset.
3. Set the Trap Width default to .004″, as well as the Black trap width (make sure it’s INCHES, not points or picas)
4. Under “Images,” everything but “trap images internally” should be checked. Click OK.
5. Reopen the Trap Presets panel menu, and choose Assign Trap Preset. Choose your new trap preset from the list, select the range of pages to which it should be applied, and click the Assign button. And click Done. (It’s stupid to have to reopen the panel to accomplish this, but you have to do it. Just play along.)

NOTE: this does not actually trap your file. It creates trapping rules that ordinarily are exercised by a RIP that performs the traps. That’s what happens in the next steps: InDesign sets up the trapping parameters, and Distiller acts like a RIP. Here we go:

1. In InDesign, File>Print.
   Printer: PostScript File
   PPD: AdobePDF 7, 8 or 9 (whatever you have)
   Under “Output,” choose:
   Color: In-RIP Separations
   Trapping: Application Built-In
2. Click Save, and InDesign creates a PostScript file
3. Launch Distiller, and choose the PDF/X-1a:2001 setting
4. Distill the file and look at the resulting PDF: all your cyan artwork will be .004″ fatter. The trap “rim” itself is set to overprint, but none of that matters: when the printer outputs the cyan plate, they now have their beefed up artwork for the embossing.

NOTE: I’ve exaggerated the spread amount to make it obvious in the illustration below.

It took a bit of digging to get to the root of the problem: The missteps took place at several points in the job’s life.

As a preface to explaining how we cleared this up, I should mention that “Pantone” is synonymous with “spot color” in the minds of many. However, there are also Pantone swatch libraries that describe process builds, such as the PANTONE Process guide, the Color Bridge guides, and the PANTONE solid to process guides. While the lists of colors in these guides may resemble what you’re accustomed to seeing in the PANTONE solid coated/uncoated books or swatch palettes (which do refer to spot colors), it’s important to recognize the difference!

So, with that in mind, here’s how it happened:

Step 1: The customer picked a lime-ish green — PANTONE DS 302-2 C, to be exact — from the PANTONE Process Coated swatch library in InDesign. That word “Process” should have been a hint that this choice designates a CMYK build, and InDesign’s Swatch Options dialog bears this out (see below; click on image for larger view).

But apparently the customer (as so many folks do) equated “Pantone” with “spot,” and worried that the Color Type field still indicated “Process.” By switching the Color Mode to CMYK, he (or someone before him) then managed to change the “Color Type” to “Spot.”

Step 2: The customer service representative writing up the job saw the word “Pantone” and the number “302,” and left off the crucial “DS” and “-2″ designations. Again, this is probably due to the mindset “Pantone = spot,” and being accustomed to the common spot naming convention — “Pantone plus a number”. And printing out separated lasers or using InDesign’s Separation Preview would, of course, support this perception. So the job was written up as a two-color job: black plus Pantone 302. As evidence that the numbers mean nothing between Pantone systems, the process build “Pantone DS 302-2 C” is lime green, and the spot color “Pantone 302 C” is a nice Mediterranean blue. You can already hear the ominous music in the background, can’t you?

Step 3: The printer ordered Pantone 302 ink for the job.

Step 4: Even though the ink order requested “Pantone 302 green,” the ink supplier didn’t raise a red [PMS 485] flag despite the fact that they were shipping blue ink.

Step 5: Nobody in Prepress caught the discrepancy: the job ticket said “302,” the swatch in InDesign contained the digits “302,” so the job just kept on going. They generated proofs, sporting the festive green color. The customer, of course, approved the proofs. Nobody was paranoid enough to whip out the Pantone book to check (and, hey, I probably wouldn’t have, either. I stopped memorizing the PMS colors when there were, oh, about six colors. Way back in the last century.)

Step 6: As the press crew was getting ready to start the job, a pressman realized that the Pantone 302 blue ink specified for the job was nothing like the lime green on the proof, and the job came to a screeching halt, mercifully before any paper had rolled through the press. (see below)

It took some detective work to retrace the steps that resulted in this mess: because the Pantone DS swatches correctly manifest themselves as process builds in InDesign’s Swatches, the fact that it was a spot swatch was the first mystery. Once we deduced that the customer had manually wrestled with the Swatch Options to force the swatch to be spot, everything fell into place. Ultimately, the printer used a custom-mixed ink to match the designer’s specified CMYK mix.

The moral to this story? Well, there are two:

For the designer — It’s important to understand the difference between spot and process colors, and to be clear on the distinction between the swatch libraries and what they represent. If you intend to print a spot color, pick from the PANTONE Solid color book or swatch palette in your software. If no spot color does what you have in mind, request that the printer create a custom mixed ink matching a sample you provide (printout, fabric, your eye color, whatever). Be prepared to pay a little extra for that service.

And, by the way, the opposite holds true: don’t pick from the PANTONE Solid book/swatches if you intend to print as CMYK. Pick your color from the Color Bridge or Solid to Process book or swatches. Some spot colors simply cannot be matched with combinations of CMYK; it’s best to face this early in the job, or change the job specs to allow spot colors if you just must have that bright orange or navy blue (two hues that are notoriously impossible to render faithfully in CMYK).

For the printer — You just can’t be too paranoid: when you see mystery letters or numbers such as “DS” or “-2″ in an ink designation, don’t ignore them. Play detective; don’t assume.

And if you think you’re confused now, we could talk about the new Pantone Goe system, which gives you an entirely new system of designations to memorize. But we won’t. Not yet. Maybe later, after I’m well-rested.

Given the difficulty of editing PDFs (even with the big guns of PitStop), I think this is understandable. It goes beyond fixing a comma: sometimes extensive changes are necessary to make a job print predictably. For example: a solid black back cover on a brochure, if built and printed as 100K on an offset press, will be anemic and blotchy (toner-based digital presses have a more robust black). Consequently, a large solid black area is usually converted to a rich black for stronger coverage. Unless you anticipate this when building your page layout, the printer needs to be able to modify the content so the job prints to your satisfaction. Not much fun to attempt fixing this in a PDF.

I bring this up because of all the PDF Workflow hype I encounter, especially in Adobe literature (disclaimer: I love Adobe the company. I love Adobe products. And Adobe is a client of mine, too.). While I also love a good PDF, I think the “all PDF, all the time” philosophy needs a grain of salt.

The core of this is: ask your printer. Seems simplistic, but never assume. And even if your printer asks for PDFs, insist on precise specs for PDF version, compression settings, and color space. Better yet, have them send the correct .joboptions file (world’s longest file extension). If you own Creative Suite 2 or newer, import the settings into InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator or Distiller. Doesn’t matter which application you use to import the settings: they go into a common repository and become available to all the apps. (If you have individual point products — not as part of the Suite — this trick doesn’t work.) Then, when you export or save PDFs, invoke the correct setting, and you’re good to go — in theory.

First, your original file needs to be healthy. Images must be of appropriate resolution, fonts must be embeddable, dimensions of the file (including bleed, fold positions, etc.) must be correct, and so on. Get the idea? Your job should be perfect; then it’s safe to make a PDF.

Second, you must follow the printer’s supplied specs. Oh, you couldn’t get specs from the printer? The customer service rep said “I dunno. Just make a PDF. How hard can that be?” Oh, dear. Now it’s up to you.

In this situation, I recommend you take the safe path and generate an easily-digested PDF/X-1a file. Yes, I know it’s Acrobat 4.0-compatible, and that sounds old-fashioned. Yes, I know it flattens innocent transparent objects. But if you’re sending a poor little PDF out into the wild to fend for itself, go for the lowest common denominator. Any RIP worth having can RIP a PDF/X-1a file. If your printer’s steam-powered RIP can’t chew it, find another printer.

I’m not a Luddite: I dream of a world wherein all RIPs run on the Adobe PDF Print Engine, where live transparency is maintained throughout the life of a job, where color management is not terrifying to mere mortals, and we can blithely submit PDF/X-4 files without fear. I also dream I’m 24 and skinny again. Trust me: there’s some hope for the first dream. We’re just not all there yet.