Ok cool, that clears it up for me then, colour it is. Thanks for the info on the PPD, I’ll look into it. I’m gonna be getting round to the videos on Preflight stuff etc., on Lynda.com later, at the moment I’m just going through David’s InDesign CC Essentials course, marvelous it is too.

The two major things I’ve taken away from you guys on forums and what I’ve watched so far is to make sure I have good master pages set up for each different page style, and that there should be a paragraph and character style for virtually every formatting to be applied to text, so as to make changes easier in the future. Any more broad fundamentals for best design practice that you guys know is always welcome.

Hello Artwork Abode and thanks for replying. So as regards basic typesetting and creating styles I’m getting there in that I’m going through a whole load of courses on Lynda.com at the moment, they really are wonderful, so I’m getting up to speed daily on some of the basic stuff.

You said, “the easiest way would probably be to print to a .ps file using a B/W PPD and the distilling the resulting file back to a PDF,” ok I’ve seen the postscipt file option in the print dialog vox but what did you mean by a PPD?

“But when you go printing there would always be option to print in b&w,” am I correct in understanding that you mean that no matter what colour one puts in a document, the printers can always just ignore any colour settings and print it in black and white anyway? So I could hand them a full colour PDF and they could just print it out black and white?

Also this is going to sound so novice and ‘Microsfot Word’ like I’m embarrassed to say it but nevermind, here goes, isn’t it possible, once the full colour document has been prepared, to just select all and then choose to colour everything black and be done? Wouldn’t that work?

Thank you for your patience.

So that was basically the answer I was looking for, that it’s not a necessity to align to the baseline grid. Thank you for that. I looked at David’s Real World InDesign and came across this statement of his, “When you have more than one column of text on a page, it’s important that the baselines of the text line up across the columns,” the key part of that for me being, ‘when you have more than one column,’ I don’t, just one text frame.

“The secret is keeping everything on even lines. Let’s say your leading is 14 point leading. You want spacing to equal 14.
For example, my main head needs space above and below. I might add 10 points above and 4 points below. That equals 14. That way the text following is on even lines. The head itself won’t be, but the text following will be.” I ‘kind of’ understand what you mean here, but being a novice this is all kind of confusing. When you say your main head, what do you mean exactly? Sorry for my ignorance.