Sometimes (okay, often), our workflow will be to take a design, turn it into a pdf, then lay that pdf out multi-up for final printing on 11×17 or larger.
For instance, it may simply be a compilation of two customer supplied pdfs (pages1-3 from one source pdf and pages 4-25 from another). This “combined” 1-up ID file is then saved and exported as a 1-up pdf. The 1-up pdf is then laid out for final printing, finishing and bindery.
Occasionally, the underlying 1-up design needs some changing. As long as we maintain a pure pdf workflow here, there isn’t much of a problem. If we instead of importing the 1-up pdf, we import the 1-up indd file (which seems more streamlined, fewer potential issues, etc, not to mention being able to open the imported indd file directly) we get similar results.
I did get bit by this and don’t know if it is a bug or just a workflow issue. The underlying 1-up document was composed of an imported pdf as a title page, followed by several pages of InDesign tables. That title page was moved to a different folder, causing a missing link in the file. I was not aware this had changed and when I went to print the 4-up design, there were no prepress errors and the links were clean. But, because that pdf had been missing, the result had a proxy image on that title page. Opening the 4-up design did in fact update the links when it opened, but it apparently did not check for whether there were link issues in the imported indd files.
My question here is, is this a bug or user error in the workflow (not to mention quality control at print time). Is there a way to know if an imported indd file itself has prepress errors?
I am reminded of font errors from imported pdfs (usually generated from MS Word) that did not properly embed fonts. Nothing we could do if we didn’t have the original Word document. They printed fine, but it always showed a missing font error in the “graphic” of the pdf. This seems to have gone away of late, though.
.
