printing seps to PDFs?

[ElyseC]

I have something that's going to be printed in two colors (black plus spot), but must be provided as traditional art with halftone dot in place. Art will be shot dot-for-dot and plated. Software: InDesign. Printer: new Xante Accel-a-Writer at the office (such a gorgeous beast, but I digress!).

I've assigned magenta to be the spot color's alias (to simplify things and preserve the drop shadow effects the guy put in). What I haven't been able to figure out is how to get a PDF of the separate plates.

I've got a "printer" called Adobe PDF showing up in my Printer Setup Utility
and fiddling around with its options I found what looks like the Accel-a-Writer 4G PPD I grabbed from the Xante site yesterday and ran the installer for.

Now, it's a puzzle why Adobe PDF is there but unalterable in Printer Setup Util. and it appears with the little (!) symbol next to it in the pop-up menu in the print dialog box.

It looks to me like I should be able to use that Adobe PDF thing to set up separate virtual printers with whatever installed printer driver I want, whether or not I have the physical printer available on my network. No? And if I try to print something to it, everything looks like it's sending info to it, but nothing happens after the send and no new files are created anywhere (that I can find) on my system -- they just dont' exist.

So I guess I have at least two mysteries to solve:

1 - why is Adobe PDF there but unavailable, appearing to accept a "print job" but producing nothing?

2 - can I set up virtual printers that will create color-separated PDFs with the halftone dot patterns already in place.

Any other ideas for me? Am I missing something obvious?

[terrie]

I'm clueless but have you tried uninstalling and then reinstalling the Adobe PDF "printer"???

Terrie

[ElyseC]

Originally Posted by terrie

I'm clueless but have you tried uninstalling and then reinstalling the Adobe PDF "printer"???

No, because I haven't a clue how it came to be in my system anyway! <sigh> I think it just came along for the ride with something that got installed way back when three years ago and I don't know what.

[terrie]

elyse: No, because I haven't a clue how it came to be in my system anyway! <sigh> I think it just came along for the ride with something that got installed way back when three years ago and I don't know what.

Ahhh...I thought it was part of Acrobat or even PageMaker...since it's not doing anything useful at this point, why not trying uninstalling it and see what happens???

Terrie

[don Arnoldy]

Originally Posted by ElyseC

Any other ideas for me? Am I missing something obvious?

EEC-

I just ran a test in ID-CS3 (other versions may vary)

In the print dialog, go to the output tab. choose separations from the color drop-down. set whatever marks and bleeds you want.
Then choose Postscript® file from the printer drop-down. The print button will turn into a save button. Click that. Then distill the postscript file.

--don

[annc]

I lways use Export to get PDFs out of InDesign. You get lots of options that way.

Once you've done the export, you can print the PDF.

[Michael Rowley]

Elyse:

it's a puzzle why Adobe PDF is there

If you haven't got Acrobat, it would be, but you get it with Acrobat. I've got it set up as my default printer, but never actually print to it.

[ElyseC]

Plain ol' CS here. No such tab do I see, in fact NO tabs do I see. On the left I have the list of settings available for tweaking:
General
Setup
Marks and Bleed
Output
Graphics
Color Management
Advanced
Summary

In the "Printer:" pop-up menu I have my inkjet printer and "Adobe PDF" I mentioned. In the "PPD:" pop-up menu below that are the PPDs for lots of printers, but not a one that I have, including the Accel-a-Writer 4G that I ran the installer for. The PPD menu also has "Devide Independent" as an option.

OK, as a test I just picked one of the PPDs in the list, something that sounded similar to what the Xante is/does, "HP Laserjet 4 PostScript 600DPI". Now, with that PPD selected I suddenly have the option for Separations in the Output options.

So, I think it's confirming that somehow I need to get the Accel-a-Writer 4G PPD in the right location on my HD for InDesign to see and be willing to work with it.

Shouldn't there be a single PPD folder somewhere that all Adobe apps know to consult?

[ElyseC]

Originally Posted by annc

I lways use Export to get PDFs out of InDesign. You get lots of options that way.

Once you've done the export, you can print the PDF.

Yes, I use ID's PDF generation all the time and have lots of presets set up for it, but there's no option for printing seps with any of them that I can see.

My suspicions are, I believe, being confirmed by Don -- I need to print the seps to .ps file and distill to get the PDFs I want. Now it seems the trick is getting the right PPD into the equation.

[curveto]

Doing separations begins to make things device specific, err... dependent. The Export functionality is intended to move the document out of InDesign for exchange (and potentially further work). ...thus no separations.

Print (to device) vs. Export (to anything). It was a conscious choice (that InDesign team made). Part of that "let them point the gun wherever they want but if they point it at their head disable the trigger" decision tree every (well designed) product/feature goes through.