Will a drop shadow print okay if placed as a separate frame over the graphics placed below?

Hi Miss Sparkles,

Do you have Adobe Acrobat installed on your system? The correct way to make a PDF from InDesign is File > Export > PDF (Print). (Interactive PDF is for forms, animation, etc., and not what you want here.)

You ask if the PDF will be "flat". The default options will save into Acrobat 5 without layers. Layers were introduced in Acrobat in version 6, so if you change the settings for the joboptions to Acrobat 6, you can then enable the option for InDesign layers if desired, and the layers can then be toggled in Acrobat.

Most of us think of "flat" as flattening the transparency, though. Transparency was introduced in Acrobat 5, so saving in Acrobat 4 will flatten the file.

InDesign supports layered PSDs, and PSD is the correct format for images that are placed into InDesign. Go to Object > Object Layer Options to toggle layers or layer comps. If you need to edit the image, right-click it in InDesign and choose Edit With > Photoshop, make the edits, then save and close. Doing it this way will automatically update the Links panel.

I have never heard of PSD layers getting switched off by accident, but you might ask that on the InDesign forum. We can move this thread if you ask us to.

On a Mac, you can choose File > Print and print to PDF, but it is not advised. You won't see it in the InDesign dialog box for Print though, thankfully. While Adobe created PDF, they gave it away years ago and not all PDFs are Adobe PDFs (they are just the best ones, imho!) When you choose File > Print > PDF on a Mac, the PDF will say Quartz, meaning it is made by the Mac OS. In File > Print, you will also see Adobe PDF as an option if you have Acrobat installed — use that only if you don't have a better choice. It's not meant for Adobe applications.

If you are wondering how a PDF was made, go to File > Properties > Description in Adobe Acrobat and it will tell you. For your purposes, you want it to say it was made in Adobe InDesign.

In JJ's screenshot, you can see he is printing to a Microsoft PDF, which is not an Adobe PDF. His dialog is different because he is not in InDesign. When you create a proper PDF in the application you are using, you will retain features that you will lose when you use the Print command. In InDesign, Export to PDF means you will retain your links in your table of contents, hyperlinks, bookmarks, and other live features.

JJ mentioned "Print to a file". Twenty or thirty years ago, we created PDFs by choosing "Print to file", which made a PostScript file, and you still have the option to do that by choosing File > Print > PostScript File, as per your screenshot. Before Acrobat came out, we sent that file to the printer, then years later we used the Acrobat Distiller to convert the PostScript file to a PDF that we could see before sending it off. All that is old technology, although it can still be done, and sometimes we hear folks insisting it continues to work for them.

It's better, though, to use the modern methods and choose File > Export from InDesign to make the PDF. 😊

I hope this helps, and please ask if you have more questions,

~ Jane

The image should print like the rendered documet's composite. That is what is printed not layers.