Reply To: Help! Print production wants me to use mostly Photoshop

It’s great that you can breathe new ideas into their organization. There will be resistance. There always is. There are thousands of organizations like the one you’re at, and they want to become more productive but they don’t want to learn to change. Sigh. Be gentle with them.

You should learn about how your files are sent to the printer. PDF is best.

Ripping is what they do on their printer. If you print from MS Word, the printer “rips” it. (Technically it means “raster image processor,” which means turning everything into tiny tiny dots.)

If InDesign crashes when a PDF is exported, there is something very wrong. That’s not normal, no matter what you have in the document.

If you want a great education, read this post and, more importantly, the comments after it — especially those from Dov Isaacs, who is at Adobe and has long been one of the great gurus of PDF and printing technology: https://creativepro.com/pdf-print-engine-throw-us-your-transparency-effects.php

The comment about TrueType is almost certainly outdated. (There are protected fonts that cannot be embedded into PDFs, but they’re not just truetype and they’re relatively rare.)

And, in the meantime, you should tell them they should send you to The InDesign Conference in DC in November!