Helpful Tips

February 25, 2020

Prepress Resources – Helpful Tips from AGI’s Prepress Essentials Course

Instructor: Greg Heald – gheald@agitraining.com

  • Saving Lo-Res PDFs – When saving a lo-res PDF for screen viewing purposes, avoid saving as “Smallest File Size” as this format does not embed fonts. Saving as “Press Quality” will embed fonts and still create a file that is small in size, which should allow for attachment to an email and prevent font issues.
  • RGB vs CMYK – RGB has a wider color gamut and is meant for on-screen viewing. Therefore, it is beneficial to work within the RGB color space, converting to CMYK when the project is ready to print. Some of the more vivid RGB colors cannot be fully captured in print (see graphic below), but any spot colors used will remain unaltered. Refer to chapter 1 (page 3) of the Adobe Print Publishing Guide for more information.
    A graphic showing the overlap of RGB and CMYK color spaces
  • DPI vs PPI – Dots per inch, or DPI, is a term used in reference to physical print resolution (dots of ink per square inch on paper). PPI stands for Pixels per inch, and refers to the resolution of images on-screen. 300 PPI is typically the standard minimum resolution that printers will prefer for a clear image.
  • Lossy – Term used to describe the loss of data when saving and re-saving certain files, such as JPEGs. Some compression occurs each time the file is saved, resulting in loss of resolution overall.
  • .indd vs .idml – Saving an InDesign file as .idml allows it to be opened with older versions of InDesign (CS4 or later). An .indd file will not have the same compatibility with older versions of InDesign, but is able to be opened with your current version as well as any newer versions.
  • Image Cropping – If you are working with an image that needs to be cropped, it is best to save the cropped version of that image to place into the file, rather than placing the entire image and decreasing the bounding box to create a visual crop. This helps to keep the file size down.
  • Fonts – It is possible to drag and drop fonts directly into InDesign’s font folder as a quick workaround when needed (for example, if you are opening a file that has been packaged, but the fonts are not installed on your machine). However, this shortcut only makes the fonts available through InDesign, so Font Explorer (or equivalent) should still be used to properly install a font for continued or future use.

Further resources are available at the Adobe Help Center:

https://helpx.adobe.com/support.html