The second reply to this thread establishes that this topic is discussed frequently, and there are several scripts and other software addressing this need. That makes it clear to me that there are users out there who would like to have this feature and whose workflows would benefit from this feature (as in: it would make things simpler for them to just check a checkbox in InDesign than using other software to achieve the same results). Are there enough of them to meet your definition of many? I don't know, and ultimately I don't even care.
The fact that there are users out there who see no need for the feature, or who'd rather see the world change than to see InDesign change, isn't reason enough not to implement this very simple feature on Adobe's end. InDesign (and other Adobe apps as well) is full of stuff that was way harder to implement on Adobe's end, yet caters only to subsets of users, so why not cater to these users as well? Clutter? Hardly. One checkbox would suffice. And because some users feel that the feature would make it harder to change the world into a better one? Well, Adobe isn't an ideological organization, if there's demand they should just cater to it. The feature has been in Adobe Acrobat for ages, so as far as software goes I see no reason not to implement it in InDesign as well.
I applaud anyone who takes a stand against bad workflows, or unsound methods of any kind, and I'm one of those who can't wait for a global all-out RGB/LAB workflow on hardware-calibrated screens with a single unified icc-RGB/LAB icc-profile for delivery of all print jobs, using one pdf per job regardless of the number or shapes of pages, inserts, spot colors and so forth, where it's then up to the printers to make sure their printing processes matches the unified icc-profile as closely as possible. There are few technological hurdles to achieve this today (though plenty of economical ones), and I'd love to live in that world … but unfortunately I don't. And until I do, I want Adobe to cater to the needs I have today.
And for you to suggest that my level of experience has anything to do with this only shows a limited understanding of how people and the world works. And that's not me taking a stab against you or ideology at large, just your suggestion that people who don't feel the same way as you are somehow lesser than you. The fact that I don't see it as my job to educate printers, and change the errors of their ways, doesn't make me inexperienced. In fact, in my experience, there are plenty of experienced designers out there who aren't willing to spend any of their time arguing with printers or struggling with changing the way printers work – many, if not most, of the designers I know tend to spend their time doing design instead.
What geographical market do you work in? |
I've only worked in Europe, but I've worked all over the spectrum … sometimes with low end printers for cost effiency (and man oh man, the stories I could tell you, the horrors of their beliefs is truly astonishing), but also with huge modern highly-automized magazine plants with optical scanners automatically correcting colors in the press and automized processes for continually delivering up-to-date icc-profiles for all products, but usually I've worked somewhere in the middle. One thing that's very common over here though, which I suspect to be true all over the world too, is "pseudo-printers" – companies that negotiate lower prices with several printers by aggregating lots of clients/print jobs and then subcontracting them to these printers. It's good for the economy (except maybe for the printers, though it makes it easier for some of them to run near full-capacity which is of course good for them too), but it more often than not means catering to the weakest link – that the specifications are dumbed down to fit the worst printing plant in the mix, even though many others work in more modern ways.
It's hard for me to fathom a printer who can't use Acrobat's feature to split the document, even if they do in fact need per-page PDFs, which they shoudn't. |
It's hard for me to fathom a printer who doesn't make it their job to know a hell of a lot more about catering to the needs of designers than most designers do, but rest assured there's enough of them to go around. And it's hard for me to fathom a designer who've had extensive contacts with many a printer who wouldn't also know this to be true. But maybe you've just been very lucky in who you get to work with … and I don't mean that as in “coincidence”, but that you are lucky to be able to work only with non-backwards printers. In the recent economy few companies that I've worked with are willing to pay anything extra for expertise – increasingly, everyone's just looking to save a buck.
And anyway, the issue here isn't whether the printer can or should achieve this themselves or not, it's about Adobe not catering to users need to quickly and simply meet the printers specifications. I'm a designer. People pay me to do design for them and deliver files for print – they don't pay me to argue with printers. So I deliver files according to specifications. If this somehow makes me inexperienced, or even stupid, in your eyes, then so be it.
While I've more or less given up in trying to change how others work, what I occasionally do attempt, in order to make my world a little better, is to contact software makers and suggest to them ways to make my life easier through changes and additions to their software. But before I do I like to make sure I haven't just missed something. That's why I came to these forums with this. To probe whether there's really still no way to perform this simple task in InDesign, not to probe what others think of me for wanting a checkbox that would eliminate one slight annoyance from my life.
I work for an offset printer as a prepress operator, and i'd NEVER ask for single page/file PDFs unless i wanted to preflight dozens/hundreds/thousands of individual files at a time (e.g. 64pp book comes in, i can either check 1x64pp file; or 64x1pp files... know what i'd rather do!). I completely agree with John Hawkinson and Bob Levine that it's counter productive.
Similarly, in the 15 years that i've been in prepress here and overseas, i've only ever had one client supply files as single file/page PDFs, and it was another printer who had imposed the art first using a method similar to this method, before running out of time themselves to print the artwork and gave us the artwork to print.
However I have read the OP's post above (post no.12) and take the point that it is irrelevant which provider will or will not want single page/file PDFs; but the fact that the dialog box for making single page/file PDFs doesn't exist except through scripting or third party.
Apart from suggesting the PEU exporter from scott zanelli (many other posters here have suggested the same thing) if the OP really wants to see this feature in future versions of indesign, go to the indesign wishlist and ask for this feature.
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