Preparing for Professional Print -- Help!

[illstrator]

Guys,

I've never used InDesign and I'm still learning a lot of the Adobe programs. I just got off the phone with a printing press who said it would be much easier if our Illustrator graphics were laid out in Indesign. He was saying that it is very inefficient to create all artwork in Illustrator and directly save it as an EPS through Illustrator. He said that the best way is to use InDesign to lay out the images and text and then save it for printing.

Does this make any sense to you guys? I don't know InDesign at all so for one I have no idea how to do this and two why is it inefficient to save Illustrator files into EPS straight through that program?

HOpe this makes sense.

Thanks in advance.

 

[jmgalvin]

If you mean that you're preparing everything in illustrator and then placing it in indesign, you're making things awful hard for yourself.

If nothing else, all text becomes uneditable since indesign sees it as a graphic. An indesign file that consists of all placed images will also be gargantuan, causing everything to run slow. Of course you can also run into problems associated with each placed graphic, bad postscript parsing in and eps, incorrect color profile in a raster, etc.

As the printer told you, the most efficient and common way of doing multipage docs is to do as much as possible in the app that will be used for final delivery. It's efficient, editable, and casues teh fewest problems. There's a reason that newspapers and magazines use page layout programs like indesign or quark, rather than running things up in ilustator or photoshop and then placing them in the page layout app.



Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[tangerinewoman]

Hello again (I replied in the Illustrator thread as well) (slow day at work).

Just to explain in case you're not clear:

InDesign simply makes a link to your graphics (you can see them in the links palette), using a lower-resolution version of them (be they illustrator files or photoshop files or whatever) purely so you can see where to place it on your page. This means that it keeps the InDes file manageable.

When you come to "package" (called "collect for output" in Quark) your file to send to print, it automatically gathers all your files together and that's what you send to the printer – a whole load of p-shop or illustrator files, your fonts etc. and your indesign doc that holds them all together.

Also, I think when jmgalvin says "An indesign file that consists of all placed images will also be gargantuan" he means illustrator... Sorry if not jmgalvin!

InDes also handle type much better if you have a lot of text to include.