or how to make your print provider’s day go better; Part II
1. Do you PDF/X-1a?
Don’t be put off by the obscure and cumbersome acronym. Of the myriad formats and vehicles for sharing electronic files, PDF – specifically the flavor called PDF/X-1a – has become the standard in the printing industry. For good reason, we think.
After decades of struggling with dozens of divergent, incompatible formats, from Quark to Word to Postcript to My-Cool-Little-Layout-Program-That-Only-3-People-Use, not to mention platform-dependent idiosyncracies, the graphics world has settled on a system that smooths out virtually all the bumps in the road to reliable output (that means printing things the way you want them). Besides more predictable output, PDF has the extra benefit of slimming your files for sending to the printer. Instead of packaging up and transmitting 250 big ol’ Megabytes of documents, graphics and fonts, you can just shoot over a fit and trim 14 Mb (or so) PDF.
For those who are not convinced about the efficacy of PDF for print, the first step is often to recognize that PDF is not some mysterious alien entity threatening your way of life. It’s there to help you in your graphic pursuits, to look out for your interests as a pro designer. And, like a sort of altruistic software superhero, it’ll do this pretty much for free.
Of course, you’ll need access to good graphics software. But you already have that, otherwise I doubt you’d be reading this. Adobe makes it particularly easy to make great PDFs (not surprising since they invented the format).
It is head-slappingly simple to do in InDesign: go to File > Export > Adobe PDF. Then pull down the top Preset menu to PDF/X-1a. Press Export.  D’oh! In Illustrator, it’s File > Save As. Then pull down the Format menu to Adobe PDF. Grab that PDF/X-1a Adobe PDF Preset  from the menu (you’ll get a warning that trying to open or edit the resulting PDF file in Illustrator might not work, but that’s OK – save the original .ai file as a precaution). That’s really all there is to it. Each piece of graphics software will have its own special way of serving up the PDFs, but remember to lay on the X-1a sauce.
Your print service provider will send you secret thought beams of thanks for it. But even more importantly, your job will print just the way you expect – provided, of course, you have  inspected your new PDF/X-1a file to make sure everything looks right.
This last bit can be accomplished best in Acrobat, where the under-heralded Output Preview feature will show you…yes, an actual preview of the output: a simulation of  how colors will separate, which colors are overprinting and which are knocking out, and also how any transparency effects were flattened. The Output Intent specified in a PDF/X will tell Acrobat how to render the colors as they likely will appear in the final output (the default tends to be U.S. Web Coated – typical magazine style printing – but you can change this). In version 8 and above of Acrobat, Output Preview mode is invoked automatically when you open a PDF/X document. If you open the Output Preview panel you will see a list of color separations (CMYK and any spot colors). Make sure they are all there. Click off the colors one-by one to see how the file will separate. If there are extraneous colors listed, or the wrong colors, then you may need to go back to the original document and make modifications.
Not to dwell too heavily on the Adobe references, but they do offer a great guide to print production (this is a big PDF file) which contains a goodly bit on PDF creation, editing and minutiae.
In case you can’t tell, I’m trying to emphasize the friendly simplicity of PDFing your files. But I’ll make a stab at including one odd detail about the process: adding in crop marks and bleed area. In some inscrutable act of (IMHO) illogic, Adobe and others (actually an association of technicians in Ghent, Belgium) have ignored these attributes in the PDF/X standard. So, if your page has content that bleeds off the page edge, you have to check the appropriate boxes in the PDF Export or Save As dialog boxes (they are reasonably self-explanatory). That way the file should need no other manipulation by the printer’s prepress to try to reveal your design’s bleed area (which would still be there, but hidden from view outside the documents Crop box.)
Under the hood, PDF/X-1a is configuring all the formatting, graphics, fonts, colors, and other attributes of your file so that it will output on a modern printing press:

• All fonts will be embedded (as long as there are no pernicious licensing restrictions)
• RGB and ICC-based colors will be converted to CMYK
• Trim and Bleed boxes will be included as appropriate. By the way, you did read that bit about bleed area in PDFs above, didn’t you?
• Annotations, hyperlinks, markups, movies and sound are removed, as are all actions and Javascript.
• All transparency is flattened. A good reason to inspect your final PDF is to make sure all your glorious transparency effects (you know those drop shadows and emboss and bevel effects you used? Those are transparency effects ) are rendered into a suitable “flat” form. PDF/X-4, by the way, is just like PDF/X-1a, but it leaves the transparency “live.” This can be OK, but your printer’s software might not flatten the piece the way you expected.
• A host of obscure little technical attributes are checked and corrected to make the file X-1a compliant.

Also awesome is the way PDF/X will render a “soft proof” on your monitor, translating the vibrant RGB of your computer screen into the slightly softer color gamut of the printing press. This carries a substantial caveat: your monitor must be calibrated properly, and the correct Output Intent for your printer’s press must be represented in the PDF. And, oh yeah, the print provider must have their equipment all profiled and calibrated to this Output Intent (you can always ask what Output Intent to use, and hopefully you won’t hear the sound of a mouth hanging open). In the end, the soft proof is a good general reference, but your printer’s hard proof will be the best guide to final color.
Anyone who has used the web, worked in an office or had any sort of exposure to digital information or printed matter anywhere has seen PDF in action. It’s everywhere. So whether you prefer designing in or qxd, .indd, or .ai, you should get to know PDF/X-1a. Let the goodness go to work for you.