6.2 Export Presets

Hi everyone. Now we are ready to export this magazine out into a final PDF that is gonna be shipped off to a printer. All right. So this is my work flow for doing that. The first thing that I do. If you didn't do this at the very beginning, then you wanna do this now. And we go to our master pages for this. So, I'm gonna go to my A master because all of my other master pages are reflected against this master page, so we only have to do this here. And I'm drawing out a white box. Now I have gone over this process in previous courses here, but I'm gonna do this again for magazines. The process is really no different. But this is a great PDF preset that I create every time that I'm looking to save out print work. So I am creating a white box here, and this will all make sense in just a second. I'm creating a box, and then I'm taking the transparency down to zero. We're actually utilizing a transparency flattener here. This ensures that all of our text is outlined when we save the PDF. It's really important if you're not sure who your printer is, or you don't have control over that, or they're not nearby. This really is my go to preset, that ensures 99.9% of the time that my print project is flawless from the time I sent it to the time I get it back. Nothing goes wrong. It's a great thing, and so I use this all the time. And we wanna make sure that this is on its own layer beneath everything else. So I'm creating a new layer, and then I'm dragging it down so it's beneath everything else. And we're gonna go ahead and lock that. And lock the layer to prevent any accidental changes to that. And really you don't see anything after that. It's just allowing that transparency flattener to attach to something. So what do I mean by transparency flattener? If you go to edit transparency flattener presets, you'll see that there's three options by default. But I have a new one down here. This is called Highres Outlines. This is the preset that I use for all of my print jobs. If we go to edit here you'll see that I gave it a custom name, and the settings here are standard. But I have checked Convert All Text to Outlines. That is the important step that makes sure I don't have to go through here by hand and convert all of this text to outlines. Meaning that you wanna do that because if your printer doesn't have a font you're gonna run into some major issues. So this is a way to do it automatically when I save my PDF, and it saves me so much time in the long run. So just that white box at the beginning and setting that transparency flattener. One time and one time only it remains in InDesign throughout the rest of your work flow. So when you're ready to save your magazine you just go to File > Export. You can also go to Adobe PDF presets if you have one, but we're going to go over one here. So I'm gonna create my final magazine here. And this is what I have. This is what I use by default, this outline press quality default. So you can create your own custom presets here. That saves you a lot of time. And then I also have an email size for anything that I wanna send that's smaller because this version is gonna be uncompressed, high quality, major file size going on with this preset. But this is what we want for the top quality. And you can see here that we're not downsampling anything. We have maximum image quality. It's an automatic JPEG. We have crops, registration marks, color bars, and page information checked here. We're also making sure that we use those bleed settings. Output means we're converting to destination, and we're preserving the numbers. We are leaving the destination as CMYK, also great if you have images in here that were given to you as RGB. This is gonna convert everything to CMYK. A super fast way to do that. Advanced is where that transparency flattener preset comes into play. By default one of these three may be selected, but you wanna make sure that Highres Outlines is selected. Security and summary, nothing to change there. So once you're done you can go ahead and save this preset. Give it the name that I did or one of your own, and you can reuse that anytime that you want to. Such a friendly, happy, easy to go preset. Now the awesome thing about this is that I am including this preset for you in a source file that you can download. So you can go ahead and double click and open this preset in InDesign, and you'll be able to use it. And then when you're ready to go, you just hit export, and it's gonna alert you of anything that you may have. We have some font and overset issues that I talked about in the previous lesson. So we're just gonna go ahead and export this, and it's going to go ahead and save that for us. Now, if you wanted to bring in your preset right here you can go ahead and define that, and then you can load that preset that I give you in your source file just like that. That way you have that to use, and again, the only thing you have to do with every new magazine is add that box to your master page. But if you use the same base foundation for your template for each project, then you don't have to do that a second time. You can just use this same project file, delete all your content, and add the new content that you need, and you are ready to go.