I miss working with proofreaders and editors. And I miss being the person who actually does the printing and the trimming. It’s way easier than giving instructions and hoping that the production person will be careful & catch any printer errors before delivery. Anyway.

Sometimes printers want you to send files with text converted to outlines. And sometimes you want to do that also because you don’t have any time to get a reprint if the embedded font goes wonky. And sometimes everything’s already in outlines but the transparency goes insane. But that’s different, so —

InDesign lets you create outlines through Type > Create outlines. I wanted to convert the type in the embedded vector art to outlines also. So I googled around & found that this article’s method worked pretty well: Converting Text to Outlines The Right Way. It’s for CS3 but worked for CS4.

An abbreviated how-to:

1. Duplicate InDesign’s hi-res transparency flattener (Edit > Transparency Flattener) & check the “Convert all text to outlines” box.
2. Then place a tiny transparent (.01% opacity) box on all your pages to force flattening
3. when you export to PDF (with the compatibility set to Acrobat 4).

The only problem I had exporting was with an embedded EPS file with a color gradient & transparency. The color changed to black & white. Good luck, hope this helps!

Correction: I might be wrong! I’m not sure if all type in embedded art will be converted to outlines when using this method. It didn’t seem that way this afternoon when I was rushing to prep files for the printer. But maybe I missed a step during the rush…

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Post tags: InDesign