OT: InDesign

[David Thrasher]

Ok. I give. I can certainly see the merits of discussing page layout software and I certainly respect everyone who has discusssed it's interest. I'd just like to make one small request: just mention that you are using it for video packaging so it doesn't see off topic.

Since I do work in print right now, I might as well contribute to the discussion a little:

I'm sure InDesign is very fine software but a problem you might run into if you intend to have it printed by someone else is that InDesign is not in very many service bureaus and printing facilities yet. This poses a bit of a problem for you since it requires that either they buy the software or that you put in into a form that they can use.

My experience on my job is that the majority of the files we get are Quark X*Press files, Adobe PhotoShop images, and Adobe Illustrator documents. PageMaker files do come in but much less frequently and MacroMedia Freehand files come in even less frequently. 

The files that come in the least are CorelDraw files (PC), Microsoft Publisher (PC), and occasionally some bozo will send in documents created with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel or even Microsoft Powerpoint. We have all sorts of fits working on these and I would heartily discourage using any of these programs for commercial printing unless you want to rack up a lot of expensive time having files fixed so they'll rip properly.

Of the companies listed above it appears that Quark and Adobe own the print area between them and InDesign is Adobe's attempt to own the whole thing. PageMaker wasn't working so well for stealing the remainder of the market away from Quark. With Quark being slow out of the gate on OS X for Quark, Adobe sees an opportunity and is trying to run with it.

As far as what software to use, other than what definitely what to avoid (CorelDraw, Publisher, MS Office), I'm not going to tell you what to use. Use what makes sense to you. As far as workarounds, there are a couple for getting your files to press. A really good one is to output your layout as a Acrobat PDF file. One caution with this is that you'll want to pick an appropriate job option in distiller so you don't have a low res file that will print like crap.

Mistakes to avoid and a few tips: 

Don't send your images as RGB images. Color printing uses 4 colors most of the time (CMYK) unless you are using Pantone spot colors and you'll just add to the cost if you don't convert your placed images first.

Be sure to include all your fonts with the job - both outline and screen components. If you own Quark 5, it will be easy. Just use the "Collect for Output" option under the File menu. Other programs you'll have to painstakingly manually gather together all the elements and hope you didn't forget something. (I haven't seen enough of InDesign to know if it has that feature.)

If you have images on your page that are scaled, not how by how much and scale them in PhotoShop by that much and put them back on the page at 100%. Your job will rip to press faster that way. Also, if your bitmap images are in TIFF formate rather than EPS format, rip speed will be significantly improved.

If you have any files created in Illustrator or Freehand, you can save some trouble by either converting the type into curves ("look Ma, no fonts!) or making sure to include them (embedding them) when you save the EPS file. Make sure you save the file as an EPS with ".eps" at the end of the filename to help identify it and not in Illustrator ".ai" format or whatever Freehand calls their working format.

As far as merits of the programs I find that Quark is more precise in placing elements. Instead of necessarily eyeballing where you place something you can type in exactly the coordinates of where it is to be and exactly how wide and tall the box is to be. PageMaker sort of has that too but I've found it a bit problematic to make it work properly. On the plus side for PageMaker is that text flow is rock solid and won't occasionally drift like it's been known to do in Quark.

If you want to create a template for video labels in Quark or PageMaker, here's the method I used:

I scanned the label sheets at actual size at 300dpi in order to see what I was doing and then fooled around with contrast and brightness to make the cuts around the labels stand out (it doesn't have to be pretty). Add a little area around the sheet to be able to detect the edges.

I made sure before I saved the file that the horizontal lines were running perfectly level. To do that I used the measure tool (looks like a little ruler on the tools palette of PhotoShop) and drew a line over one of the horizontal lines of the scan, trying to line it up perfectly. I did a Select All to select all of the image and then went under the Edit menu (this is PhotoShop 5) to Transform>Numeric. I unchecked all the options except Rotate. Then I took the number in that box and made it the opposite: If it said "-0.03", I'd remove the minus sign to rotate it the other direction by exactly that much. Once you are satisfied, save the image.

Place the image in your favorite page layout program. Try to line it up as exactly as possible so that edges of the 8.5 x 11 label sheet corresponds exactly with those of your page (also the same size). If you made the lines stand out well enough while you had the picture in PhotoShop, you should now be able to drag guidelines over them in your page layout program. (Tip: Magnify the page to be exact.) Once you have all the guide lines in position and everything exact, you can remove the placed image. Save the resulting blank page with guidelines as a template (a page that will open untitled leaving the original intact). 

You may have to do some tweaking to get things to line up just right on the label sheets when printing but this should get you close. I found this a lot easier than trying to measure each cut and use the rulers in Quark. Some measurements go down to four digits after the decimal point while Quark can only do three. Example: For 1/16th of an inch (.0625) Quark would do .062 which isn't quite there if you are wanting to be right on the money. It's better in this case to use a scanned image to go by and get up close and personal and eyeball it in this case.

I hope this info helps. I'll certainly skip future posts about page layout software.

-Dave 

original message:

"Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 17:58:32 -0400
Subject: [MacDV] Re: OT: InDesign
From: Matthew Guemple 
Message-Id: <5D1DECC2-8BD7-11D7-9265-000A9566D3DC at verizon.net>

Not to be cranky myself, but most of us are most likely doing our own  
packaging... so the merits of one over another are at some point  
relevant I think. If you do print for you it's a no brainer, for a lot  
of folks on the list it's not. There was a terribly long thread about  
labels a while ago for example...

I do dearly pray that no one is using the software that came with their  
labels..."