It’s common knowledge that PDF files have become the standard in just about any field of presenting a digital document. It is cross-platform and browser compatible, and it serves as a great tool for presenting a multi-page document.

Acrobat is much more robust than this of course, with capabilities for form creation, interactive PDFs, video and audio, annotations, digital signatures and even capable of starting a meeting with a slideshow. But for the purpose of this article we’ll focus on creating a regular PDF that you would send to press. For tips on preparing your artwork for print, see our post on Good Practices for Delivering Print Files.

This PDF is created from InDesign and as mentioned in our last article on print preparation, should be the last point at which you prepare files for delivery, whether a proof for a client or a file for a printer.

Making the PDF

Once your file is all ready to go, go to File > Export. Select Adobe PDF in the format drop down menu at the bottom of the window, then press Save. This will take you to a window that looks like:

I suggest you keep your compatibility setting to Acrobat 5. Some printers running older RIPs may ask for the file in Acrobat 4. Do not use version 4 unless absolutely necessary, since it flattens all your transparent objects, and can sometimes yield unexpected results when printed.

Compression

Keep all images at 300dpi with JPEG compression at Maximum quality. Note on this page there are the two check boxes at the bottom. Those nifty little checkboxes allow you to compress your PDF even further. The one to the left is self explanatory, but to the right we have a genius feature. This takes whatever image you have imported into InDesign, and crops out and discards any excess image from the file when it converts the files to PDF. So if your image was originally 8.5” by 11”, and you only used 6” by 10”, it will only convert the 6” by 10” visible area, significantly reducing file size. Just note that this only applies to raster images, not vector artwork.

Marks & Bleeds

The only printer’s marks you will need are crop marks. Offset the crop marks to 0.25”, to ensure they will stay clear of the bleed in the file. Also, make sure you include a bleed in the file of 0.125”.

Output

If you’ve read the previous post on best practices, this is where the aforementioned conversion to CMYK should take place. Occasionally your printer will supply you with a custom colour profile depending on what press they will run your file on. In the event that a profile is not provided, I suggest using the “U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2” which is pretty dependable for accuracy.

Once you have gotten all the settings to your liking, don’t forget to click on the Save Preset button at the bottom left of the window, to save your presets.