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His solution? Build a relationship with a printer, learning from experience, rather than shopping around for the lowest quote for each job. 'I'd never go with a printer I didn't know, just based on an online price. It's not worth the hassle.'

Saving for output with InDesign

There are various ways of creating a PDF. From InDesign or QuarkXPress 6.x, you have the choice of exporting a PDF directly or saving a PostScript file and running this through Adobe Distiller (supplied with Acrobat Standard or Professional). Direct export is simplest and should work fine, but some Quark users find Distiller more flexible and reliable. Avoid using Mac OS X's Save as PDF option in the Print dialog. It's handy, but doesn't create files suitable for press.

It's true, although perhaps not entirely fair, to say that InDesign seems to cause more problems than QuarkXPress. The obvious reason is that it's newer and has more advanced effects. 'We get lots of new designers who'll just do whatever the software allows, and it won't necessarily come out,' says Cypher's Paul Calland. 'We've had a lot of problems with transparency and rendering.' Colour management is another innovation that's failed to impress. 'We made a decision not to use colour managed workflows,' says Calland. Users' incorrect settings can cause more problems than they solve, and 'with the best will in the world, the press will change. Let's just get a proof.'

To create a PDF from InDesign, go to

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File, Export, choose Adobe PDF format and click Save. The Export Adobe PDF dialog appears. Choose Press Quality from the Preset menu at the top. This sets Compatibility to Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4), meaning that transparency effects are preserved in the PDF file rather than being 'flattened'. If your printer's RIP can handle this, stick with it for best results. But there are still a lot of RIPs around that will have trouble, so you may need to downgrade to Acrobat 4 (PDF 1.3). Having selected this, click Advanced. Under Transparency Flattener, choose High Resolution.

One problem this may make worse is stitching. Wherever you use 'raster effects', such as soft drop shadows, or flatten a transparency effect, InDesign has to render the affected area as a bitmap image. When you view a finished PDF, you may be able to see faint white lines where these are 'stitched' together. The lines shouldn't appear on press... hmm, don't you hate that word 'shouldn't'? More seriously, some areas may render differently from others, so that colours don't match. This is due to colour conversions performed for transparency flattening conflicting with the overall colour management of the document.

There are two solutions, neither of them foolproof. One is to turn off colour management for the PDF. In the Output section of the Export Adobe PDF dialogue, set Colour Conversion to No Colour Conversion. If you do this, you must ensure that all images in the document are CMYK Tiffs or EPSs, converted to CMYK in Photoshop before being placed in InDesign; RGB images won't print correctly.

Alternatively, leave Colour Conversion set to Convert to Destination (Preserve Numbers), but check the Transparency Blend Space, on the Edit menu, is set to Document CMYK. It's now safer to place all images as RGB, because they should be converted correctly. If you place CMYK images, you must ensure your CMYK conversion in Photoshop uses the same CMYK profile as your working space in InDesign, otherwise conversion between the two will cause mismatched colours when transparency is flattened.