Export Documents as PDFs

  • Go to the Export dialog box from the File menu
  • Select where you want to save the PDF
  • The Export Adobe PDF dialog box gives you a lot of presets to choose from right out of the box.

Selecting the Right Preset

If you click the Adobe PDF Preset dropdown menu, you will see that there are a lot of PDF format options available. The most used include PDF/x-1a (for North America) and PDF/x- 3a (for Europe). You might have to consult with your printing press before deciding on the format.

If your printing press supports it, select the PDF/x-4 for even more control over things such as transparency and a wider color gamut. For all other purposes, including on-screen ones, it is recommended to use the High Quality Print preset. It is better to avoid the Smallest File Size preset as much as possible as it can affect the resolution and colors of the images to reduce the file size.

Compression Options

You can determine the amount of compression that InDesign should use while exporting the PDF. It has a large impact on the resulting file size and also on how well the PDF renders for the web. If you are simply displaying the document for the web, a lower pixel per inch (ppi) value would suffice. If you intend to have a high quality printout, then you need a higher ppi. The compression options can be accessed from the Compression section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog box.

For exporting to the web, in the Color Images section, set the Bicubic Downsampling to box to about 150 and the Image Quality to Medium. Do the same for the Grayscale Images section as well if your document has grayscale images.

Security Options

A PDF being one of the most commonly used document exchange format, can be vulnerable if you are sharing sensitive data. It is always advisable to password protect your PDF file to ensure confidentiality of information.

In the Export Adobe PDF dialog box,

Go to the Security section

Select the Require a password to open the document checkbox and enter a password. Only those who know the password can open the PDF.

Selective Text Frame Export

Sometimes, you might not want to export the whole document but only the text in selected text frames. InDesign makes it easy and offers you choices into the formats that you can export. We will explore two methods here, one is by using the Export command and the second by running scripts.

  • Go to the File menu
  • Click Export… You will now have a few additional choices.
  • Text Only (.txt) Text Only is a simple text format devoid of any formatting. It just exports the plain text.
  • Rich Text Format (.rtf) Rich Text Format allows for basic formatting and can be read by many word processors such as Microsoft Word.

Adobe InDesign Tagged Text (.txt). Adobe InDesign Tagged Text format allows you to export the text with all the available InDesign formatting embedded in it. But it can only be read by other InDesign programs and not by any other word processor. This is useful if you are exporting text to work on another workstation with InDesign installed.

Using Scripts

  • Go to windows
  • Click on utilities
  • Click on script
  • Click on application from script panel
  • Double click on required script to apply it

Word to InDesign

The advantage of using the Place command over simple cut and paste is that you can choose to strip off formatting but just keep the overrides or modifications to the style which you can then further tune in InDesign. When importing,

Using the Place command from file menu (Ctrl +D)

Make sure that Show Import Options checkbox is checked.

In the Microsoft Word Import Options dialog box, ensure that the radio button, Remove Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables in the Formatting section is selected

The Preserve Local Overrides checkbox is checked. This will ensure removal of all Word styles but will preserve font overrides such as bold, italics, etc. when importing into InDesign.

InDesign has imported the Word document without any of the formatting styles but retained font overrides such as bold, italics, etc.

Importing Images from Photoshop

  • Use the Place command to place the psd file in the InDesign document.
  • Make sure that the Show Import Options checkbox is checked.
  • This will open the Image Import Options dialog box.
  • This dialog box will allow you to select which layer of the image you want to import and also allows you to select the transparency layer.
  • We can go ahead and import it by pressing OK.

If you have clipping paths in your original Photoshop image, you can select the clipping paths or the alpha channel while importing the image. It is always better to go with the alpha channel.