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• • December 16, 2010 at 3:46 am #58130
    Tim Hughes

    Member

    I am surrounded by co-workers who insist on making pdf files this way, they say they come out smaller, and why shouldn't they do it like this, I say it takes more work but what are the other reasons this archaic workflow is no longer needed?

  • December 16, 2010 at 3:30 pm #58139
    mckayk777

    Member

    Does not indesign just work as a front end for distiller anyway, when you output a pdf indesign is using distiller to make the pdf ??

  • December 16, 2010 at 5:32 pm #58140
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    No, you don't have to have the Distiller installed to export from InDesign.

    Export a PDF, open it with Acrobat, and look in the File Properties; under “Creator” it will say “InDesign”.

  • December 16, 2010 at 5:35 pm #58141
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    No, InDesign is not a distiller. It's writing PDF directly to disk. Distiller requires postscript.

    Reasons not to make pdfs by distilling postscript (instead of the file > export method):

    • Takes longer (make postscript, then distill it)
    • You lose all interactive features (buttons, hyperlinks, bookmarks, etc.)
    • You lose all transparency (pdf is necessarily version 1.3)
    • You lose layers, tags, and all other things that make PDF extra-functional

    That said, if the number one goal is to make a PDF as small as possible, then Distiller may do a better job. However, if you make your PDF right, it's often not that much smaller than exporting directly from InDesign. (See “drop 20 pounds” article in the current InDesign Magazine about how to make smaller pdfs.)

    I virtually always use file > export.

  • December 17, 2010 at 1:58 am #58147
    Tim Hughes

    Member

    Thanks David for the skinny on distillation.

    It generally is for making small pdfs to send to clients and pdf output for print is done from ID, I shall carry on exporting directly and some of my colleagues will no doubt plough on with distiller (will this still be possible in CS5?).

    Would I be right in saying you can lose all colour management too when making a .ps file?

  • December 17, 2010 at 11:35 am #58150
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Hm. Color mgmt is a trickier issue. It probably depends a great deal on the Distiller settings. Yes, you can export PostScript to disk in CS5.

  • December 22, 2010 at 1:01 pm #58191
    Mr.Screens

    Member

    As often happens, some early bad experiences can make one overly cautious (possibly beyond reason). I'm thinking here of several publishing clients who continued to forbid use of any TrueType fonts in their books—years and years after all issues with some RIPs not properly rendering them were resolved. In the case of exporting PDFs directly from InDesign, I have two tales from the trenches that put me off using it.

    Case #1: In of the first projects I designed InDesign CS2, I was playing with all the cool new transparency blending effects (Difference, Exclusion, etc). I noticed that when I used Export to PDF from InDesign, not all of these rendered properly. If I printed to .ps and distilled a PDF, they were fine.

    Case #2: Some years back I received instructions from a publisher not to use Export to create PDFs, because they'd found that such PDFs where not fully accessible to reading software for their visually impaired clients, whereas distilled PDFs were OK.

    Perhaps in the current version of InDesign, all these issues have been resolved, so sticking with the more time-consuming distilling workflow is no longer justified. Virtually ALL the work I do is for print, though, so I don't mind losing all the layering and interactivity. Besides, distilling an 840-page textbook just took me less time than writing this e-mail.

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