Formatting rules - font, pt size, etc.. export as pdf

Question

I'm working with a supplier that has given me their document designs using InDesign. I need to feed these designs to a team of developers who will write code to systematically buld the documents on the fly substituting names, amounts and calculations pulled from a 3rd party system.

I need to give the devs the info they need on the documen design but ....they don't have InDesign as an available tool. Is there a way to produce a pdf from within InDesign that will also display the relevant design info required i.e. font, size, colour, spacing as text\callouts\balloons (just those would be enough)?

Bill Silbert · Accepted Answer

A PDF exported out of InDesign using File>Export>Adobe PDF (Print or Interactive) can take advantage of the limited editing features in a full version of the most recent versions of Acrobat. I would suggest when you export the PDF you include the option to create Acrobat layers which will also be useful for a developer. Once in Acrobat activate the View>Tools>Edit PDF option. When you do that you will automatically get a text cursor and be able to select most of the text. You will see a Format box on the right side of the screen which will identify the font, color and point size of selected text. You can also use the View>Tools>Print Production>Set Page Boxes option to determine trim sizes of individual pages. If you've saved the PDF with the Acrobat layers option then you can then go through View>Show>Navigation Panes>Layers to see the same layers as the InDesign file had on the left of the screen. A developer can then turn on only a needed layer to save out as a separate pdf file that can then be opened in Photoshop. It is necessary to do it this way because (and this is important) a layered Acrobat PDF will become flattened when opened in Photoshop. That is because Photoshop layered PDFs and Acrobat layered PDFs are not the same. Life would be so much easier if they were but it just isn't so.

Finally, you can go through File>Properties>Fonts to see a list of all fonts that have been used in the PDF.

Test Screen Name · Answer

I am a developer, and I would not expect to have to pick through InDesign to guess the measurements, nor pick over an annotated PDF. The developers will need tables of information. I suggest you first write out the table without filling in any actual numbers. Send it to developers, with sample docs, and get approval that this is what they need and all they need. They may need measurements you never imagined, and others may be useless or in the wrong units. Only once agreed, go to the trouble of finding the measurements, and send the table with some sample documents.

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