What IS stitching?

[chixsngr]

Hi everyone. I'm working on a freebie project for my church so I decided to get my feet wet with Indesign for the first time.

I am LOVING this product, BUT....I went to go to print and crashed. Someone told me that I can't print a 14 pg booklet if I'm stitching.

Oh, I'll bite....what the %*$@ is stitching. I don't think we have stitching in Quark.

None of my smarter friends know either.

 

[jimoblak]

Stitching in this instance may mean the binding of the book but this is no cause for something to crash on print. Stitching is also the term used when transparency is flattened and there are seams visible when viewed in extreme zoom.

Go back to the person that told you about stitching and ask what they meant. Either you did not relay exactly what they said or they have no clue what they are talking about. Stitching, no matter how defined, has nothing to do with a crash.

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[chixsngr]

Yep. It was on the Adobe forum and I did ask that question. We'll see what he says.

In my research, I know that it has something to do with rasterizing vector files. My guess is you're on to something in your second thought. I don't know why that would cause Windows to crash, which is what's happening.

Any idea why my file would crash when all I'm doing is exporting to PDF? It also cause damage to the file, although it looks fine.

I did a preflight and all the fonts and images are linked.

Thanks for the help...sincerely.

 

[chixsngr]

The response I got from the guy on the Adobe board was

"In this case, stitching is short for saddlestitching."

Am I any closer to understanding what I might have done wrong?

Thanks.

 

[chixsngr]

Oh, he's just talking about the folding of the book.

How does that help at all?

 

[jimoblak]

Bob is commenting on the fact that if you really want to make a booklet, the pages must be in a multiple of 4 for stitching into a book. You need to go to 12 or 16 pages to make your book.

What messages do you get when you do File>Preflight?

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[chixsngr]

Well, Mr. Picklefish, sir....

The preflight looked OK. All the fonts were there and the images seemed to be embedded.

The interesting part is that it actually printed the first page, which was just the table of contents, all text. And then crashed when it hit the imported graphics.

I am bringing in all the graphics as PDFs, (Some are illustrator and others were Photoshop) Which may not be the right way.I just have a gut feeling that the problem is the way they're coming across.

But I stripped all the graphics out and tried to print just the bones of the book and that didn't fly either.

 

[jimoblak]

What are you printing to? A PostScript printer? A PDF file?

Try printing/exporting to PDF and then print that.

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[chixsngr]

Nope, just my inkjet at home. And that's exactly what I was fixing to do, export to PDF and then print from that. I was just trying to print an initial proof.

IDCS crashed when I was exporting as a PDF.

 

[jmgalvin]

Could you be short on RAM by any chance? I just took a look at my usage and it said that ID was using 127 megs, Photoshop was using 85, Illustrator 53 and Acrobat 62. All told I'm using 642 megs out of 1.25g gigs.

You could try turning off some other apps and see if that eases the crashes.

If you embedded a lot of images that's also going to put a pull on memory, you can unembed via the links palette.

 

[chixsngr]

I think you're right. I have embedded a LOT of images. And probably some of them are bigger than they need to be.

I opted to bring them over as PDFs just because I thought Indesign could handle it. Just because it can doesn't mean it should.

So, back to the drawing board.

Thanks everyone for your very kind help.

 

[yoderman94]

I bet the embedding is your images is your problem. I know that Micro$oft Publisher embeds them and they make nasty pdf's! I tred and tred and never could get teh pdf to print on the inkjet at home, and it took forever on the laser at work! Embedding should never be done in a "layout" program. But Illustrator you are better off to, but I dont have an answer as to why.

Chad

 

[jimoblak]

If you embedded a lot of images that's also going to put a pull on memory, you can unembed via the links palette.

Are we asserting that linked images do not take as much memory? This is a bad claim.

The trouble with embedded images is not memory. There are 3 problems:
1) Redundancy: why maintain a copy of the original and an embedded image on your drive? This wastes space.
2) More likely corruption: the more data packed in a file, the worse it will be when it crashes due to a read/write error.
3) Inability to update: embedded graphics cannot be updated in external applications like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Your failure to print may be due to #2 above. Try making a backup copy of your InDesign file and delete all embedded images from it. Then print. If you print successfully then you can blame a corrupt embedded image.

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[jmgalvin]

Jim: the embedding sonehow does create a bigger RAM draw - really don't know why. It's pretty easy to check. Embed the images and don't and check the memory usage. It also goes up if you use ID to shrink an image. I guess it's showing the smaller one, but the bigger one (using more memory) is in there.

Word suffers the same problem. As the doc gets longer and it has picutres in it, it gets slower.

None of this presents any great problem if you have enough memory. Unfortunately, out of the box computers don't jave enough memory for a lot of graphics, and people tend to resist buying a lot more.

 

[jimoblak]

Yes, I agree there is a memory difference in embedding vs. linking - but not at print, where chixsngr is having the problem. The same amount of graphics memory goes to the printer. If the 'embedded image memory' was an issue, chixsngr would have had other problems prior to print.

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[jmgalvin]

Jim: Here's where the problem pops up. If you run out of wired RAM your machine (mac or pc) is going to hit the hard drive for virtual memory. Every time you go to the drive for virtual memory all sorts of nasty things can happen. I don't kinow why, but I've found that the more you stay away from vm the happer life is - ala avoiding the nasties.

Our little shop has used macs for a long time. When machines could not hold much ram, and you relied on vm, crashes were commonplace. Once machines could hold more ram, I set the minimum/preferred memory allotments WAY up for the various apps - keeping in mind how much wired ram was available. I then set vm to only 1 meg above wired. The crashes disappeared. G3 blue and white 350s with 768-1000 megs were pretty bulletproof, running the usual gamut of graphics apps + Office, web browser & e-mail under Mac 8-9

We got some OSX G4s and added 512 megs first - 768 total. There were a few problems. We added another 512 and problems disappeared.

My guess, and it's only a guess, is that while tapping the hard drive for vm and spooling the print request to that same drive, the drive gets confused and either stalls the print job (OSX will stop the job or the whole print queu for that printer) or the you'll get a program crash (OSX quits the app).

 

[chixsngr]

I think I mis-spoke a little bit. What I'm really trying to do is export to PDF and print from that. The file hangs up in the Export.

I also tried to print, and the file hangs up in the same place in the printing, too...which is right after the first text page, when graphics kick in.

I re-imported the images last night, (which are native and sized correctly. Not large files.) looked at the preflight, which I probably wasn't looking at right the first time. Some of the images were fine, but there was a group of images that showed problems.

How do you tell what the problems ARE? They are not missing; the preflight says they are linked. The only common denominator I see is that they are all RGB. All the CYMKs are fine. In Indesign, should I be converting these before the export to PDF? Could that be it?

And why would that crash the system?

Thanks for all your advice. You're helping me quite a bit.

 

[jmgalvin]

All the images should be the same color type and match the color type you set for the document. All rgb or all cmyk. For commercial printing - all cmyk. If you're just printing off a common, non postscript inkjet, they recognize rgb. This should not effect any crashing, but who knows.

When you export to pdf, you can select color mode under the Advanced tab, however color mode should always be the same for the doc and all images before export.

I can only think of 2 reasons you're crashing - lack of ram or screwed up ID preferences. You can try the ram thing by closing all apps and restarting - to clear any memory allocations from the machine. Then just launch ID, nothing else and see what happens.

If you use a mac and want to trash ID prefs go to User/Library/Preferences. Pick Indesign and trash. Make sure ID isn't running. To trash prefs on a pc you have to do a search (with show hidden files enabled). Unfortunately, I do not know the name of the ID prefs file in Windows. Hopefully, someone else here does. If so try trashing and see what happens.

OOPs! One last thing I thought of. When you installed ID, did you have all antivirus software turned off. No applications should be installed with AV enabled, since it might identify one or more parts of the install as virus and mess up the install. If you did install with AV active, you might consider uninstalling and reinstalling.

 

[chixsngr]

I'll give it a try.

And I don't think I did uninstall AV (my husband works for System Mechanic so we have a ton of it, including Kaspersky which interferes with a lot) so, that may be it.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[jmgalvin]

You don't have to uninstall AV, just disable it.