PDF/X-5 and PDF/X-6

It’s a good question you’d expect them to show up as presets in InDesign by now. The odd thing is they don’t, even though InDesign already supports the core features these standards rely on, external references, transparency, colour management, layers and so on.

The main reason seems to be that the print industry has been very slow to move past PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-4. Those two still cover the vast majority of workflows, so Adobe has never felt real pressure to make the newer flavours visible in the dropdown.

Another factor is that Adobe doesn’t “own” the PDF standard in the same way it used to. They handed a lot of that over to ISO, and while they still have a seat at the table, they’re not driving the spec the way they once did. That shift probably explains why newer standards don’t get bundled straight into InDesign.

It’s not that InDesign can’t produce PDF/X-5 or X-6 files you can get there by using Acrobat Preflight or custom joboptions it’s just not surfaced in the UI. So in practice it feels more like a lack of packaging than a technical gap.