Exporting PDFs from InDesign

InDesign is the most modern, most powerful page layout program today. It has grown to eclipse the old standard QuarkXpress in popularity.

We accept book materials in a wide variety of file formats and work with them comfortably, but when we do layout work ourselves we use InDesign.

The InDesign feature of Transparency is a powerful tool for designers, enabling exciting and sophisticated effects, but transparency can be tricky. It has to be flattened at some stage for printing. This can take place either as the PDF files are being made (by exporting as PDF version 1.3 = Acrobat version 4), or it can be done as a separate step after the PDFs have been exported. InDesign itself does such a good job of flattening as it exports that we recommend doing it that way ... exporting flattened PDF files.

There are two critical requirements for getting successful flattening:

  1. The Transparency Blend Space and all of the (non-spot) colors in the InDesign file must be in the same color model, and that should be CMYK. Otherwise, colors can be converted back and forth among the CMYK and RGB models as InDesign or Acrobat flattens the files. This can lead to wrong colors in the flattened file. The Transparency Blend Space can be set under the Edit menu.
  2. Where regions affected by transparency overlap with strokes or type, the strokes and type need to be above the transparency layer. Otherwise they will be affected by the flattening (they will be rasterized), and the quality of the type or stroke may change at the boundary of the transparency region.

We recommend that you set the Flattener to High Resolution.

Here is our preset for exporting PDFs from InDesign:

This preset is based on some assumptions about your setup and workflow. The preset calls for downsampling images to achieve resolution 300 dpi. For example, if you built your INDD workflow with continuous tone images that have excessively large resolution, then in the export to PDF, you'll downsample to 300 dpi. There may be special circumstances under which you'll want to override this downsampling.

The preset assumes you have your bleeds set up correctly.

PDF Export Preset Instructions

Grab the SBP Preset from here and unzip it to SBP Preset 6-11-20.joboptions

  1. Go to the "File" menu in InDesign
  2. Select "Adobe PDF Presets"
  3. Click on "Define"
  4. Click on "Load"
  5. Load SBP Preset 6-11-20.joboptions

Then when you export to PDF, use this preset in the appropriate place in the InDesign configuration screens which appear after you start the export dialog.