Why Indesign not flat fonts in my diagram?

[Wojciech_Migdał]

Hi everybody!

As you see in topic...

Does anyone know how to flatten in indesign when saving to PDF.

I set good options in "Transparency Flattener Presets" but fonts in diagram is not flatten after export to pdf.

diagram is made in ilustrator.

below link to materials

Indesign - Google Drive

Regards

[Dov Isaacs]

Exactly what do you mean by “flat fonts in diagram?” Do you mean converting to raster? Converting to outlines?

Be advised that any such hackery is real exceptionally poor workflow practice that typically yields low quality output compared to keeping text as text realized by use of fonts, especially when exporting to PDF!

          - Dov

[Wojciech_Migdał]

Yes Converting to outlines?

"Be advised that any such hackery is real exceptionally poor workflow practice that typically yields low quality output compared to keeping text as text realized by use of fonts, especially when exporting to PDF!"

What do you proposed?

[BobLevine]

What do we propose? Do not convert the text to outlines.

Why do you feel you need to do this?

[Wojciech_Migdał]

Hello BobLevine

"Why do you feel you need to do this?"

Well, because I have such requirements from the printing house.

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

A printing house that has “converting text to outlines” is unfortunately not using industry-endorsed workflow practices. Such conversion of text to filled polygons (that is what “converting text to outlines” really is) causes all the “hinting” in text rendering using fonts to be lost resulting in overly-bold, blotchy text at lower point sizes for many fonts as well as an artificially-bloated PDF file size and additional overhead in RIPing the PDF file. The file also loses searchability and editability.

Quite frankly, we would recommend that you look for a different “printing house¨ that doesn't have such ludicrous requirements.

That having been said, the safest way to convert text realized with fonts to outlines is to export the PDF with the text “as is” and use the Document single fixup in Acrobat Pro DC's Preflight to Convert fonts to outlines.

Good luck!

          - Dov 

[Wojciech_Migdał]

"Quite frankly, we would recommend that you look for a different “printing house¨ that doesn't have such ludicrous requirements."

...Yes i tried but the clien want this printing house.... so thanks.

[Dave Merchant]

If you're only talking about text scraps within a diagram then I see no reason not to outline. In fact it often makes sense, if the diagram has complex text effects or only uses a couple of glyphs from a commercial font. The text will never go through InDesign's paragraph composer, so provided it was correct before it was outlined, it'll stay correct.

We always outline fonts in diagrams and logos whenever handing them to third parties, as in the past we've had problems when Illustrator "helpfully" replaced missing glyphs with default tyefaces and some fool printed it anyway.

Open the diagram in Illustrator, click to select the text object, right-click and choose 'create outlines' (shuft+ctrl+o on WIndows), save the AI file (as a copy if you need to preserve the original) and re-link the InDesign asset.

If you don't have illustrator but do have Acrobat, you can create a PDF of the diagram and use Acrobat's preflight tools to outline the characters.

[rob day]

Well, because I have such requirements from the printing house.

I'm finding that it is common for print vendors with fully automated systems to request flattened, CMYK, with fonts outlined.

These are not necessarily unsophisticated printers—Vistaprint, which is publicly traded on NASDAQ requests outlines. I doubt a human looks at the output at Vista and the client is likely the first person to see the print results. With that business model the printer surely needs to keep reprints to a minimum and the subtlety of hinting is meaningless when the output is automated to high resolutions and there's never a lower resolution proof. But, a copy protected font that gets substituted would be a problem because the client might reject the job and force a reprint.

I have never outlined fonts when sending out an online job—I'm guessing in most automated print flows the bots won't actually reject a PDF with embedded fonts.