Coupon Magazine Uses Photoshop to...

Please tell me if you think I'm going in the right direction. . .



I hope to be starting work at a coupon magazine by next week. I helped them in the crunch about a month ago and they want me to come in to manage production. I have been out of the graphic business for about 4 years but previously used Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, etc., to lay out magazines, catalogs, etc., and output jobs in a prepress environment.



I was surprised to find out that the coupon company was using Photoshop exclusively to lay out coupon ads. All ads were made as layered (many, many layers) TIFFs. All type was set in Photoshop as well. The TIFF files were then dropped into Quark 7 and sent to the printer.



I have recommended that they switch to InDesign (which they already have on all of their PCs) for laying out ads. I've made a library of coupons that can be dragged and dropped in InDesign along with a template for the whole magazine that has master pages for 1-6 coupons, half page ads, etc.



After being out of the business for a few years, I want to be sure I'm headed in the right direction. I would appreciate opinions and any advice.

Thanks,

Mike
Coupon Magazine Uses Photoshop to...
What they're doing now sure doesn't make a lot of sense, but Quark users can be a stubborn lot. :)



My only caution would be to make sure the printer can handle an InDesign produced PDF without throwing it into Quark for imposition -- there are still some dinosaurs roaming the planet.



Peter
Coupon Magazine Uses Photoshop to...
Thanks Peter. I'm supposed to get on a conference call with the printer this week. I know the printer (R.R. Donnelly) provided a ''droplet'' for Quark that allows them to make individual PDF pages from the Quark file. I suppose they do this in order to impose the layout. My research turned up that I should use a PDF output as PDF/X-1a:2001. I haven't found any options for InDesign that would allow me to make individual pages, though.



I plan to make a slow transition since they have 10 books to deal with. We'll do one or two through InDesign on the first pass (due April 1 to the printer) and then transition the rest in our down-time.



Mike

Have a look at this script:

http://indesignsecrets.com/page-exporter-utility-peu-5-script-updated-for-cs3.ph p



I haven't used it personally, but lots of people love it, and it seems to work in CS4 as well.



Peter

''I haven't found any options for InDesign that would allow me to make individual pages, though.''



If you have the full Adobe Acrobat, you can just make one full PDF and then use Acrobat to extract all the pages as separate files. That's what I do on the 90-page magazine I have to work on....



hope that helps.



Thanks, Phyllis

Thanks Phyllis. I should have thought of that. I have a real problem with not seeing the obvious.



Mike