Illustrator to Indesign- printing JPEG text

Skip all that and export a PDF X1A with the fonts embedded.

Nuks said:

Any help is greatly appreciated, as this needs to go to print tomorrow!
Thanks

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Certainly converting all the fonts to outlines would be far superior to saving pages as jpg files. That's going to look very poor.

As long as the fonts you're using allow you to convert to outlines, I would say do that. Make sure you only convert to outlines on a copy of your work, not the originals (in case changes are needed in the future).

Fonts used in Illustrator can be saved in the output files depending on what settings you use, however, if your putting those Illustrator files into InDesing on your system, it won't really matter. InDesign will have the same fonts available to it that Illustrator had.

As far as creating the imposition (printers spreads) in InDesign, quite a few shops charge EXTRA for customers that do that. Any shop worth it's fees their charging you already has imposition software that the files have to go into. Placing printer spreads into this software is HARDER for the shop to do than if the PDF was just created in reader's order.

The easiest and safest way to get a PDF out of InDesign is do do an Export to PDF. This is what we tell our customers to do who don't supply native files to us.

By Printing to a PDF, your counting on the PPD of the printer you've selected when printing to make good PDFs. Some PPDs simply will not work. (no font's embedded, subsetted fonts when they should be complete, RGB artwork instead of CMYK, Flattened low-res artwork instead of layered artwork, Rasterized type in atomic regions, ect...)

If the shop you're working with demands PDFs from you, I would ask them for the PPD for their workflow. For example, we use Kodak Prinergy and that PPD is available both on our FTP site for our clients and Kodak's Website.

Good luck-

And that's the idea of the X1A. If it doesn't meet the standards for X1A, you should know because it will throw up an error.

decksnap said:

And that's the idea of the X1A. If it doesn't meet the standards for X1A, you should know because it will throw up an error.

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Of course. However, some people have a very hard time making the X1A compatible PDF.

We don't demand X1A compatible PDFs. That's what we have Preflight Technicians for. 99% of the time, we can make it work. If the client doesn't have to be bothered, it's all the better. It's more of a service that they can supply a file to us and WE will jump through the hoops to get it right, not them. That's what they pay us for.

If we have to invest a full shift into making a PDF work, that pays for itself in client satisfaction.

EDIT- and this is what sets American printers our from the cheaper Chines competition. Service and turn times. Our clients COULD order their product from oversees, but they choose to spend more with us because of the service we (and other American printers) can provide.

Nuks said:

So I think I will just create outlines in Illustrator, put that into InDesign, do my page numbers in InDesign, and then create outlines for them as well.

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The outline idea is 100% better than the jpg thing.

Just keep original files on everything, as I've said before, so that you have something to go back to after converting to outlines for revisions or changes.

And you're printing to a PDF out of InDesign? What version of InDesign do you have?


It's too bad the shop your working with is so clueless. In todays print market, the competition for print work is fierce. It seems like everyone with a copy machine sells print services.

I know your probably under a deadline for this project, so switching vendors isn't an option, but in the future look for a better print provider.

As a print buyer, you are really in the driver's seat in todays market. A lot of print shops are hungry for work and will really compete on price and services.


I'll check back later if you need any more help. I work until 7 am cst, so I can help you until then.

Another idea-

You said you needed to print to a PDF to create printer's spreads. What about building the actual pages in InDesign in printer's spreads so that you're not dependent on the Print to PDF option out of InDesign?

I've had clients do this in the past, and if in the future, you need a reader's spread PDF, you can just export the pages in that order out of InDesign without re-working anything.

-Good luck

Since everything is built as spreads in Illustrator, you can place the spreads and then close the image crop box to just show the half of the spread you want on each page.

Then with the next page, you can adjust the image crop box to show the other half of the spread.

Illustrator to Indesign- printing JPEG text

They probably wouldn't use either for the actual presentation, but they might create the content in one of them. When finished, a multipage PDF would be created which can be a presentable format. When presenting they would simply go through the pages just like if they were slides.

I agree, essentially any design program is much better than powerpoint since it's targeted towards consumers and not designers. Typically my solution for making a nice presentation with powerpoint is...I create each slide in photoshop, then I bring in all my images to powerpoint and assemble them. powerpoint is my presentation platform, but the actual content was make else where so it looks professional.

A minor aside, but JPEGs have no place in any print-based workflow. Use TIFFs for all your bitmap/raster graphic files.

I save all my native .ai files as PDF-compatible, BTW. This bloats the filesize, but means that the live document pages can be placed as images in a multi-page InDesign or Quark document and exported as a multi-page PDF from there.

Cheers!

Jim