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Many hi-end digital presses are at 400 dpi and greater.
And if the document will also be made into a digital PDF, hi-res monitors and smart phones have 400 ppi or greater.
Build your layout to size, 7 x 5.5.
Ensure that placed bitmap graphics (aka, Photoshop files) have a final Effective Resolution of 600 ppi after you've scaled them in your layout. Check that in the Links panel:
When done, Export to PDF (Print). In the export settings, set the compression to 600 ppi:
That should work for the print shop.
You confuse DPI and PPI.
By @Willi Adelberger
Nah. Too many decades of experience teaching prepress (I was the halftone queen of the dark room), digital imaging, and Photoshop.
DPI (dots printed on paper) is no longer as carved-in-stone as it was during the 1980s and 1990s...or even the early 2000s. The number of dots that end up printed on the paper (or substrate) is determined by the print shop: what types of prepress tech do they have? Type of paper? What kind of press will be used?
And even my little community print shop down the street now uses stocastic screening on all jobs. They like hearing their customers say, "wow, that looks great!" Stocastic uses a variable dot size, unlike traditional halftone screening, and produces a more vibrant, crisper image than traditional halftones. https://www.brumleyprinting.com/what-is-stochastic-screening/
The use of terms like lpi and dpi is fading!
Never heard of this whatsoever... might be a new thing.
By @Eugene Tyson
Newer press technologies have drastically improved over the past 20 years, such as digital (both liquid ink and toner) and waterless offest.
They can handle finer line screens, 200 lpi, 250 lip, or greater (which using the above cited formula works out to 400-500 ppi). Better press technologies have substantially reduced dot gain. Throw in Stocastic (FM) screening (which is now very common), and you have the equivalent of 500 lpi according to some prepress specialists.
The printing industry has been raising the bar on visual quality, even with quick-print jobs.
Because we design for so many different technologies, it might be wiser to think of a pixel as the smallest unit of data that contains color information, rather than a dot of light on a screen or a square of color in a super-zoomed-in Photoshop file.
Recent research found that 80% of our daily information is read on a mobile device...not a printed newspaper or magazine, not even a desktop computer monitor.
Print isn't dead and probably won't ever die, but the last statistic I heard was it's less than 50% of the number of impressions in the 1990s. What's being printed today must meet the consumer's expectations, who are used to seeing saturated colors on their hi-res smart phones, not to mention their Samsung Neo QLED ginormous TVs with its 3D pixel technology. (Love love love mine!)
Commonly quoted numbers like 72 ppi, 96 ppi, 150 lpi, and 300 ppi are for last century's technologies, print or digital.
Apple iPhone 13 pixel resolution is 460 ppi (https://versus.com/en/apple-iphone-13-pro). But Samsung's Galaxy S22 Ultra beats out Apple with 500 ppi (https://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/galaxy-s22-ultra/specs/). Some 300 ppi "traditional" graphics look blurry on these phones, especially if the photo has straight lines, sharp angles, and text. Most users pinch up and enlarge the images, and those low-graphics look like fuzzy crud on their smartphones.
Apple Retina 5k and 6k computer displays are 218 ppi (https://www.apple.com/displays/). Microsoft's Surface Pro laptop screens are 200 ppi, and most flat panel desktop monitors are 150-200 ppi.
We use 400 ppi for all our work, whether it's press-quality PDF going through stocastic screening at a short-run print shop or a digital PDF version that will be uploaded to a website. And we have had some printers of speciality products (hi-end advertising for example), that required 600 ppi. But 400 ppi seems to be the sweet spot for today's mixed-media publishing of both print and digital. It will print well, and also look good on someone's new smartphone.
@toddeindc, build your bitmapped graphics/photos to the highest resolution possible — that is, have the maximum amount of pixel data in the file. If you're snapping a camera's shutter, set it to RAW with the highest number of pixels. Scanning? Max out the resolution of the scanner and double the size (2x enlargement).
Place the hi-res file in your InDesign layout, resize and crop it, but make sure that the final Effective Resolution is a minimum of 300 ppi, or in your case, the 600 ppi your printer has requested.
Export the PDF for press with the compression set to 600 ppi as your printer has requested.
And if you will also export an interactive version for posting on a website, set its compression to 300 ppi, which is the highest Acrobat has preset in today's versions.
So if the print shop says 600 ppi, then 600 ppi it is!
If it turns out they don't need that high a resolution, they'll dumb it down during prepress. No harm done.
You can't.
Adobe has pre-set the resolutions for interactive PDF to be between 72 and 300. You can type any value you want in the field, as long as it is no higher than 300 nor lower than 72.
I believe that this needs to be changed by Adobe, given the rapid increase of screen/display technologies everywhere, from 4-5k desktop monitors, smart phones, and flat panel TV monitors in conference rooms. I cringed at a high-level presentation last year when one of our 300 dpi interactive PDFs was up on a 60+ inch ultra-hi-res monitor. The graphics looked fuzzy and pixelated to the folks at the front of the room.
Workaround:
If all you need are active hyperlinks in the PDF — and not a fully interactive PDF for accessibility or with buttons, animations, etc. — then it is possible to make a Print PDF with hyperlinks.
- Select any of the print PDF presets (High-quality print, PDF/X, Press Quality, etc.)
- Select the resolution you want in the Compression section
- Check the option to include hyperlinks (or any other interactive elements in the drop-down box).
Hope this helps you get what you need.
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