InDesign and Knockouts

[Seanchai]

I work for a company that prints church bulletins. Editors at the church use Publisher to create PDFs, which we then place in InDesign templates and RIP to a PlateStream. We them print the bulletins on a web offset press.

We're having a bit of trouble with knockouts. We've got the settings in Publisher set so the number of knockouts is greatly reduced. We've been having the church editors create separated PDFs and our knockouts have been manageable.

However, we've been upgrading our clients to Publisher 2007 and having them use a plug in to create composite, not separated, PDFs. When we place these composite PDFs in our InDesign and RIP them, suddenly, everything's knocked out.

We've checked out InDesign help, our manuals, and our nifty third party books about InDesign, but we can't find a setting in InDesign that'll eliminate the knockouts.

We've looked at the Window > Attributes menu. That would allow us to set things up to overprint things, but it won't work when we select PDFs.

We've also gone to Edit > Preferences > Appearance of Black and checked the Overprinting of [Black] box, but no luck.

Any help you could provide would be much appreciated. Thanks!

John T. Grose

 

[eugenetyson]

I don't think it's anything to do with InDesign.

Why not just RIP th pdfs from Publisher? Why introduce indesign at all? Seems a bit of waste to be inserting to InDesign. All indesign sees is a link to a file.

If it helps though, in the Export PDF option in InDesign, check the Simulate Overprint check box.

In output, compatibility, change this to Acrobat 4, then simulate overprint is available.

That might work.

But I don't think you need the indesign stage at all.

just make composite PDFS from publisher then RIP them , the rip should be able to separate them into CMYK.

If you're looking to convert the colours to CMYK then you can do that in Acrobat.

Tools>Print Production>Convert Colours

Then save the pdf.

 

[Seanchai]

Thanks!

We ask our clients (we have about 270 different editors scattered across the western half of the United States) to produce PDFs for the standard reasons - font substitions, varying versions, etc.. Some do occasionally send us Publisher files, but they tend to be problematic.

Also, our editors have varying degrees of familiarity with graphic design and even computers in general. They work on their bulletins page by page in a single page view, rather than dealing with imposition, printer spreads, etc..

Finally, our business model is built on selling ads in the bulletins. The churches don't actually pay for software, tech support, or to have their bulletins printed. It's all paid for by advertising. We create the ads, create ad grids, update them as needed, etc., ourselves. So there are one to three pages in each bulletin that the church editors don't even see until it's printed and shipped back to them.

So we need something to place the PDFs and ads in the proper layout to we can RIP 'em and plate 'em.

As I said, this has worked just fine when we were getting separated PDFs. Publisher was handling the knockouts then and as long as Publisher's settings were set properly, it worked just fine. Now that we're getting composite PDFs, information about what to knockout is either not getting passed along or isn't being handled as we'd like it to be by InDesign.

John

 

[eugenetyson]

It's a hard one to help you out with, as I don't know what the pdf looks like, can you post a pdf as a link that I could download and look at it?

Have you tried the Simulate Overprint?

 

[Seanchai]

I don't know if my supervisor would be okay with me posting a PDF (as they actually belong to our clients and we just process them, really), but we'll try Simulate Overprint. Thanks!

John

 

[eugenetyson]

I have a blog

http://www.doozler.blogspot.com

in here is a way to give me the pdf

at the top right, there is text in green, at the end of the paragraph is me... so to speak

you can count on my honesty

 

[apepp]

...sounds to me like the pdf files have the overprinting information already inside the pdf, as opposed to indesign doing anything...

...i would verify that the publisher users have their trap settings configured correctly. If all is well there, then it would point to how they are creating the pdf files, in which case i would look into using a different pdf maker that does preserve overprints...

...are they using the pdf add on from microsoft found here?:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...11-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

Andrew