Features

Other transparency problems include text looking fattened or smudgy where it's overlapped by a transparency effect. This can usually be corrected by bringing the text box to the front.

You'll gather that transparency problems can be tricky to diagnose, which is why we think it's incumbent on printers to come up with settings that will work on their systems. If you can cope with any more on the subject, it's worth reading Adobe's Designer's Guide to Transparency for Print Output (adobe.com/products/creativesuite/pdfs/dgt.pdf) and Transparency in Adobe Applications: A Print Production Guide (http://media.studio.adobe.com/linked_ content/en/acs2bgtransparency/acs2bgtransparency.pdf).

Saving for output with QuarkXpress

Quark introduced transparency effects in version 6.5, and by opting for a more modest implementation seems to have avoided quite so many problems. To save a PDF, go to File, Export, Layout as PDF. In the Export as PDF dialog, click Options. In the Job Options tab, tick Embed all fonts and Subset fonts below. The subset percentage isn't a big deal, but it's common to subset all fonts below 100%. Subsetting means that only the characters used are included, not the whole font. This reduces file size and complexity at the expense of editability, which you shouldn't rely on anyway.

Under Compression Options, the default settings allow huge image files to stay huge, potentially causing huge delays on press. It's more sensible to set Compression: Automatic

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Zip/Jpeg high and Resolution: Downsample to 300dpi. Do this for both colour and greyscale. Ignore Monochrome unless you've placed any mono (pure black and white bitmap) images; in that unlikely event, choose Compression: CCIT Group 4 and Keep Resolution. You can tick Compress Text and Line Art. In the Output tab, choose Type: Composite and Print Colors: CMYK. Turn off OPI (open prepress interface, which you won't be using) by unticking OPI Active in the OPI tab.

If the resulting PDFs don't suit your printer, the alternative is to go through Distiller. Choose Preferences from the QuarkXPress menu, click PDF and switch from Direct to PDF to Create PostScript File for Later Distilling. You can either drag the resulting PostScript file onto Distiller or automate the process using a Watched Folder, as explained in Distiller's documentation.

Colour management is neither as integral nor as commonly used in QuarkXPress as in InDesign. It's turned off by default; the main advantage of turning it on is that you can have placed RGB images converted to CMYK on output. To do this, choose Quark CMS in Preferences and tick Colour Management Active. Under Destination Profiles, set Monitor to your monitor profile, and both Composite Output and Separation Output to your printer's press profile or a generic approximation, typically Euroscale Coated v2. Leave Default Source Profiles alone unless you know better. Set Display Simulation to Composite Output Color Space.

Although both QuarkXPress 6.5 and InDesign are capable of converting placed RGB images (including Jpegs) to CMYK, most printers still recommend that you convert images to CMYK in Photoshop and save them as CMYK Tiff files before placing them. There's some merit in this: Quark is happier when not trying to manage colour, and problems can arise in InDesign if you get your colour settings wrong. On the other hand, as we've seen, there are benefits to using RGB in InDesign. It's too soon to say how QuarkXPress 7 will fare in real world use, but many printers are betting on it being more straightforward.