Creating EPS Files

To create an Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file from InDesign, choose File ‚ Export, or press z +E or Ctrl+E. You'll get the Export dialog box, which like any standard Save dialog box lets you name the file and determine what disk and folder the file is to be saved in. The key control in the Export dialog box is the Formats pop-up menu, where you choose the format (EPS, in this case).

After you've selected EPS in the Export dialog box's Formats pop-up menu, and given the file a name and location, click the Save button to get the Export EPS dialog box, shown in Figure 32-7. The dialog box has two panes, with General being the one displayed when you open the dialog box.

Figure 32-7: The Export EPS dialog box's General pane.

The General pane

Most export options are in the General pane, shown in Figure 32-7.

In the Pages section, you can set the following options:

• The Pages radio buttons let you choose to print All pages or a Range, in which case you enter a range in the Range field. When specifying a range of pages, you can enter nonconsecutive ranges, such as 1-4, 7, 10-13, 15, 18, 20 .

  Tip ‚  

  If you want to print from a specific page to the end of the document, just enter the hyphen after the initial page number, such as 4- . InDesign will figure out what the last page is. Similarly, to start from the first page to a specified page, just start with the hyphen as in -11 .

  New Feature ‚  

  InDesign CS now lets you enter absolute page numbers in the Range field. For example, entering +6-+12 would print the document's sixth through twelfth pages, no matter what their page numbers are.

• The Spreads option, if checked, prints facing pages on the same sheet of paper ‚ this is handy when showing clients comps , but make sure you have a printer that can handle that large paper size .

  Tip ‚  

  You may not want to use the Spreads option when outputting an EPS file for eventual printing on an imagesetter if you have bleeds because there will be no bleed between the spreads. If you use traditional perfect-binding (square spines) or saddle -stitching (stapled spines) printing methods in which facing pages are not printed contiguously, do not use this option.

The unnamed, middle section of the pane controls the handling of fundamental elements: PostScript version, graphics, and fonts. Here are what the options do:

• In the PostScript pop-up menu, choose the version of the PostScript language to use in creating the EPS file: The Level 2 option will work on a PostScript Level 2 or later printer (the majority in professional environments), while Level 3 will work only on the newer PostScript 3 devices, which can include built-in color calibration, color separation and trapping. Be sure to ask whoever is outputting your files which version to use.

• The Color pop-up menu determines what happens to colors; your options are CMYK (for commercial printing), RGB (for online display), Gray (for black-and-white printing), or Leave Unchanged (which lets the output device figure out what to do with the colors). For commercial printing, choose either CMYK or Leave Unchanged, depending on your service bureau's recommendations and the capabilities of their output devices. If your file uses spot colors, you'll want to use Leave Unchanged so they aren't converted to process colors, but the service bureau will need to have a printer that can handle that format.

  New Feature ‚  

  InDesign CS adds the Leave Unchanged option to the Color pop-up menu in the Export EPS dialog box's General pane.

• The Preview pop-up menu lets you choose the format for the EPS file's on-screen preview, which is what you see on-screen when you place an EPS file in a program like InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, QuarkXPress, or Macromedia FreeHand. Your options are None, TIFF, and ‚ on the Mac only ‚ PICT. TIFF is a safe option if you're using recent versions of image editing, desktop publishing, and illustration programs. Older Mac programs may require you to select PICT.

• Use the Embed Fonts pop-up menu to determine whether all fonts, no fonts, or just the characters used will be embedded into the documents; the corresponding menu options are Complete, None, and Subset. Complete is the best option because it ensures that if your service bureau needs to edit the file later, the file will include all font information. If you choose Subset and the service bureau changes some text when editing the EPS file (such as to fix a typo), there's a chance that some characters used in the editing won't be in the file. Use None only if the service bureau has all the fonts you use and knows to load them into the printer before outputting this file.

• In the Data Format pop-up menu, select ASCII or Binary. The ASCII option creates a larger file but can be edited by someone who understands the PostScript language; the Binary option creates a smaller file that is not editable. The one you choose depends on whether you want or expect your service bureau or commercial printer to try to fix any problems in your file encountered during output. Be sure to talk to those people up front, so you and they are agreed on whether such efforts should be made.

In the Bleed section, you can set the bleed area for the Top, Bottom, Left, and Right sides of the page. If you have element bleeding off the page, you'll want a bleed setting of at least 0p9 (0.125 inch) ‚ that builds in enough forgiveness so that, when the pages are folded and trimmed , any elements that bleed off the page will in fact do so, even if there's a slip in the page alignment.

Note ‚  

The Export EPS option does not let you use any bleed settings you may have set in the New Document (File ‚ New ‚ Document, or z +N or Ctrl+N) or Document Setup (File ‚ Document Setup, or Option+ z +P or Ctrl+Alt+P) dialog boxes. That's odd, since the Export PDF (File ‚ Export, or z +E or Ctrl+E) and Print (File ‚ Print, or z +P or Ctrl+P) dialog boxes let you use those document settings. Nor can you have all four bleed automatically use the same settings, as you can in those other dialog boxes.

The Advanced pane

The Advanced pane contains specialty settings affecting image substitution, transparency flattening, and color plates. Figure 32-8 shows the pane.

Figure 32-8: The Export EPS dialog box's Advanced pane.

The options are:

• In the Images section's Send Data pop-up menu, you can select from All and Proxy. Use the All option (the default) for all documents that will be printed, even if you're publishing the file electronically (on a CD or via the Web). Use Proxy (which sends a low-resolution on-screen preview version of the document's images) only for documents that will be viewed on-screen and won't be printed (or where you don't care that the printouts will have low-quality graphics).

• In the OPI section, check the OPI Image Replacement option if you're using Open Prepress Interface (OPI) image substitution, in which the high-resolution files are stored elsewhere and the layout uses for-position-only versions to save disk space and save screen redraw time. You can also use the three options in the Omit section to specify which images should be stripped out: EPS, PDF, and/or bitmap images. You would use this only if you have high-resolution or color-corrected versions of these files at a service bureau and want them to substitute those files for the lower-resolution placeholder files you used during layout. By omitting these graphics files from the EPS file, you make the EPS file much smaller.

• In the Transparency Flattener section, you can select a transparency preset, as well as override any transparency settings applied to individual spreads. Transparency flattening reduces the complexity of documents that have lots of transparent and semitransparent objects overlapping each other, which can dramatically increase output time and even prevent printing.

• At the bottom of the pane, check the Simulate Overprint option if you're exporting to Acrobat 4 (PDF 1.3) format and have objects overprinting each other (via the Attributes pane). This option is grayed out if you're exporting to Acrobat 5 or 6 format, because these formats support actual overprinting.

• Click the Ink Manager button to change which color plates print, adjust ink density, and alter trapping sequence.

  Cross-Reference ‚  

  See Chapter 31 for more on OPI and transparency flattening. See Chapter 29 for more on overprint simulation and the Ink Manager.