Part VI: Output Fundamentals

Chapter List

Chapter 29: Preparing for Color Prepress

Chapter 30: Preparing for Printing

Chapter 31: Printing Techniques

Chapter 32: Creating Output Files

Part Overview

There are few thrills as exciting as seeing the results of countless hours of publication design. You labor over everything from text creation to layout to graphics, until you wonder what you got yourself into. Then you send it off for printing, and sometime later get your printed copies. All of a sudden, you feel great memories of those long days and nights evaporate as you see all that work made real. You lovingly hold the copy, and remember why you love publishing so much.

Ironically, the output step of publishing is often the last thing on people's minds when they begin a project, even though it's such a vital step. Decisions you make early in the process will affect what you can output (such as color models used in graphics, which you learned about in Chapter 8). For example, the whole issue of color prepress, covered in Chapter 29, relies on the decisions you made when creating your colors and graphics.

So, even though you may be buried eye-deep in the tasks of creating your publication, find a way to step back and consider the production implications of your decisions. The chapters in this part will show you what you need to be aware of as well as show you how to output your documents for printing or for use in the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) format often used for network- and CD-based documents, as well as for Web-based documents.

The first and most tricky step in document output is setting up your printer and the related driver files on your computer. This varies considerably from platform to platform, and InDesign has expectations that will vary from the other programs you use, so be sure to pay close attention to the setup details in Chapter 30.

Once printing is set up, you should check the document to ensure that it will be output correctly. This process is known as preflighting, and Chapter 30 also shows you how to use InDesign's preflighting tool. Finally, if you're not doing the actual outputting yourself but will pass the document and its elements on to someone else, be sure to use the Package feature also described in this chapter.

With your document preflighted, you're ready to actually print it. There are dozens of output decisions to make in doing so, and Chapter 31 walks you through each one.

In some cases, you won't actually print a document but instead will deliver a version in electronic form with all printing settings embedded. That's where InDesign's several file-output options come in handy, as Chapter 32 shows.