Common areas
In the Print dialog box, the only area that changes is the area containing options specific to each panel. All other areas of the Print dialog box are common areas that remain visible regardless of the panel you are viewing. In the interest of consistency, options that don’t apply in a certain workflow are dimmed, not removed. If an option is dimmed, but its label is not dimmed, the option does apply but can’t be changed.
Printer Preset, Printer, and PPD menus
The Printer Preset, Printer, and PPD menus are at the top of the Print dialog box because they set the context for the controls in the rest of the Print dialog box. The three menus are interdependent and should be set from the top down.
Printer Preset, Printer, and PPD menus set up the overall printing environment.
The Printer Preset menu at the very top of the dialog box can change any or all print options by applying saved settings that you can customize.
The Printer and PPD menus set up how PostScript is written. InDesign CS2 can output
PostScript that is specific to or independent of PostScript drivers or devices. For more information, see “Setting up PostScript output paths” on page 72.
The Printer menu lets you choose PostScript File or any printer set up in the operating system.
The PPD menu choices are determined by the current Printer menu setting. Specifically, if you have a PostScript printer selected in the Printer menu, the PPD menu will display, dimmed, the
PPD that was set up with that printer by the printer driver (through the Add Printer wizard in Windows or Printer Setup Utility in Mac OS X). This guards against assigning a PPD other than the one properly set up with a particular device. If you or your customers want to create a
PostScript file targeted to a PPD for a printer not connected to the computer, choose PostScript
File on the Printer menu.
For this reason, make sure your output devices are properly set up using the Add Printer wizard
(Windows) or the Printer Setup Utility (Mac OS X). Ensure that your PostScript output devices are set up with the correct PPDs. Once you set up your printers, you don’t have to change them until your workflow or available devices change.
Panel list
Use the panel list to change the options on the right side of the Print dialog box. You can move up and down in the list by pressing Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac OS) and the up or down arrow keys, or the Page Up and Page Down keys.
Panel list
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Proxy
The proxy in the lower left corner of the Print dialog box gives you graphic feedback on how well the current job settings fit the selected media. It updates dynamically any time you change a setting that affects the print area required for the job.
Proxy
The proxy has three views. To cycle through the views, click the proxy. The views are as follows:
Standard view: Displays the spatial relationship between the current print settings and the current media (paper) size. It answers the question “What is the page position relative to the media?” It accounts for all options in the Print dialog box that affect the print area requirements of a job, including but not limited to slug area, bleed area, tiling, thumbnails, and scaling. The bleed area is shown in red and the slug area is shown in blue; purple is where they overlap.
Standard view
Text view: Presents the proxy data as text.
Text view
Custom page or cut sheet view: Displays the spatial relationship between the selected media
(paper) size to the paper transport system, including the printable area. It answers the question
“What is the media position relative to the device’s paper transport system?” It also displays indicators for the color output mode and the relationship to the paper transport system. This view displays the effects of the Offset, Gap, and Transverse settings on the media size in relation to the full width of the media; these options are only available when a custom page size is selected.
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Custom page or cut sheet view
Device-specific options
The panels of the Print dialog box are designed to accommodate the most commonly needed output options. Some output devices have special options that aren’t available in the Print dialog box panels. You can gain access to device-specific options by clicking the Setup button
(Windows) or the Page Setup and Printer buttons (Mac OS). By providing a consistent user interface for standard output options and also providing access to device-specific options,
InDesign CS2 gives you complete control over output.
Access to device-specific options is available through the buttons to the left of the Save Preset button.
Caution: If you click the Setup button (Windows) or the Page Setup or Printer buttons (Mac OS) and set options in those dialog boxes, be sure you understand how those options will interact with the rest of the Print dialog box, as described below:
• If you will often need to set device-specific options that are not available in any of the Print dialog box panels, save your device-specific settings before running InDesign jobs. You only have to do this the first time you operate a particular workflow.
• Some options appear in both the InDesign print dialog box and the driver-specific dialog box, such as page range, page size, PostScript level, and font downloading settings. When options are duplicated, set the option in the InDesign print dialog box. For this reason, you will typically not need to set options in the Page Setup dialog box.
• If you use a printer driver’s options to print to a file, InDesign passes file-level control to the printer driver. For example, file attributes such as the file name extension will be set by the printer driver code, not by InDesign. However, regardless of how you print, the code that draws the pages themselves is always generated by InDesign.
Mac OS X note: InDesign CS2 does not support the Preview option in the Mac OS X Print dialog box. The Mac OS X Preview option generates a screen-quality PDF that is not suitable for previewing a prepress-quality document. Instead, use any of the high-quality preview options Adobe InDesign provides:
• To preview an output area, use the Preview Mode, Bleed Mode, and Slug Mode buttons at the bottom of the toolbox.
• To simulate how colors appear on an output device, choose View > Proof Setup and then View > Proof Colors.
• To see the layout at high resolution, choose View > Display Performance > High
Quality Display. The next two options also display at high resolution.
• To simulate overprints, choose View > Overprint Preview.
• To simulate color separation, choose Window > Output Preview > Separations.
Cancel button
If you click Cancel, changes you made in the Print dialog box won’t be saved. The only exception is that if you saved settings in a driver-specific dialog box; changes you made there will be saved.
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