From the course: InDesign Secrets
194 Using Ink Manager before sending your project to the printer - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
194 Using Ink Manager before sending your project to the printer
- Talk to any printer and they'll tell you designers are forever sending them PDF and InDesign files with spot colors, when they really wanted process colors. So please, do yourself and your printer and everyone around you a favor and do two things. First, learn to work with spot colors properly. I talk about this in great detail in my course "InDesign Insider Training: Working with Color" here in the online training library. And second, and even more important, open the Ink Manager each and every time you export a PDF or send a file to a print provider. You can find the Ink Manager in five different places inside InDesign. The easiest way is just to go to the Swatches panel click on the Swatches panel menu and way down here at the bottom is Ink Manager. But Ink Manager also appears in the Separations Preview panel menu the Export PDF dialog box, the Export EPS dialog box, and the Print dialog box, as a button. Make sure you know all the places that you can find Ink Manager. That said, it doesn't matter where you choose it from, they all go to the same place, this dialog box. Now the Ink Manager lets you do all kinds of things, including aliasing one spot color to another, and managing trapping sequences and it's very rare you'd need to worry about the trapping stuff, but it's very common that you need to think about one other thing that this Ink Manager does, and that is converting spots to process colors. Now, the first thing that you should do when you open the Ink Manager dialog box is scroll through this list of inks up here at the top. This shows you all the different inks in your document. Not the swatches or colors but specifically inks. That is, if you printed color separations right now, how many plates would probably come out? Now the four process colors are always there at the top and they're followed by spot colors. If you didn't expect any spot colors at all, then this list might come as a shock. But, as I said earlier, printers often open people's documents and they find not just a couple but a dozen or more spot colors. That's bad! So, what do you do if you have spot colors in this list and you didn't want them? Well, you can convert a single spot color to a process color by clicking in a column to the left of the color. That converts it to a process color. Now note this does not change the color swatch. It just signals to InDesign that this color should be converted to process whenever you print or export to a CMYK format. Alternatively, you can convert all your spot colors to process by selecting this check box down here, All Spots to Process. Then, click OK. By the time you're ready to print or export a PDF, I know you're tired and you think you know your document well enough, but as I said, it's always a good idea to check Ink Manager. It just takes a moment to look over, and it can save you and your printer a lot of time and headache.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.
Contents
-
-
229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
-
230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
-
(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
-
232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
-
(Locked)
233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
-
-
-
161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
-
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
-
(Locked)
163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
-
(Locked)
164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
-
(Locked)
165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
-
-
-
(Locked)
111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
-
(Locked)
112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
-
(Locked)
113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
-
(Locked)
114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
-
(Locked)
115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
-
(Locked)
108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
-
(Locked)
109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
-
(Locked)
110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
-
(Locked)
090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
-
(Locked)
091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
-
(Locked)
092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
-
(Locked)
093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
-
(Locked)
094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
-
(Locked)
052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
-
(Locked)
053 Understanding component information6m 39s
-
(Locked)
054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
-
(Locked)
055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
-
(Locked)
056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
-
(Locked)
048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
-
(Locked)
049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
-
(Locked)
050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
-
(Locked)
038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
-
(Locked)
039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
-
(Locked)
040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
-
(Locked)
041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
-
(Locked)
042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
-
(Locked)
028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
-
(Locked)
029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
-
(Locked)
030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
-
(Locked)
031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
-
(Locked)
032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
-
(Locked)
008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
-
(Locked)
009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
-
(Locked)
010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
-
(Locked)