Separations needed

If you don’t wish to print to ps/distill and want separations from an InDesign exported PDF, I’d personally use Enfocus PitStop Pro to rework the file into a usable format.

It's been a while since I've worked with engraved/raised printing on business cards, but this was the way we handled it around the turn of the (21st) century -- Crimony, that sounds like so long ago ...

I'm working in the United States and familiar with printer's measure and inch measure (our business cards are 2x3.5 inches, rather than the metric equivalent of 55x85 mm). For my sake, please let me express measures in inch-measure terms and translate them into metrics if that's your model.

1) For the cards we'd design them one-up, with an quarter-inch margin (~6.5mm) all around. That's larger than your 5mm margins you specified, but not entirely out of range of accounting for the live area. As far as spacing between elements, we would design "loose" with enough distance between elements to allow for space between plate runs. No measurement, but inside of an eighth of an inch (~3mm) was considered too close.

2) Then we'd copy the one-up design and lay it into designed templates five-up (one column, five rows) or ten-up (two columns, five rows). On our templates we'd place the top card where we wanted it, then step-and-repeat the following four "rows" a twenty-fourth of an inch (~1mm) more than the two-inch depth (2.0417 inches) to account for paper chewed by the blade cut. For the second column on 10-ups, we'd just step the five-up layout 3.5 inches across and live with splitting the difference for a forty-eighth of an inch (~.5mm) offset.

3) Since we're talking about laying down "solid plates" -- no tints, no screens -- we'd specify really garish color builds for each process. Raised prints would be a bright lavender, embossing was a vivid chartreuse, etc. The color plates would be named for what they'd do, not for how they looked onscreen. It'd look like a toxic dump site onscreen, but the plates would be solid builds and properly labeled when we ran negatives and/or plates.

4) We'd specify printer's marks -- crops/registration marks/labels -- to know which plate did what and how it was supposed to line up. Then we'd run the negs, burn the plates, lock 'em up on press and let the job fly.

For our purposes, this worked slick and consistently. Hopefully, you can adapt this workflow for your purposes and get good results.

Hope this helps,

Randy Hagan

What do you mean omit, i thought it was a preview and you could not just save a separation as a pdf page from this? It’s single colour printing not cmyk, it’s dies, letterpress, embossing and foiling, the files still need to be imposed through InDesign

can I ask bob can you still print to pdf or just postscript, which is the better option or is there one, also if I do print to .ps does the print size if set in Indesign override the ones in distiller?  this would be easier than cropping in acrobat possibly

my issue is I need to send for foil blocks and dies for engraving which they need as a single colour pdf,

Why does it have to be single color?

You are using AcrobatPro, can't you choose Separations from the Advanced>Output tab and then emit the desired spot color plate?

There’s not.