How to Create Pages in InDesign? Part IV

Continue from Part III

Reusable Document Setups
This section is about efficiency. As I’ve said before, if you’ll do something more than once, do it only once and automate it. InDesign has numerous automation-enabling facilities for many common tasks, including reusable page setups.
Document Presets
At the top of the New Document dialog (File >New >Document) is the Document Preset dropdown menu (see Figure J). By default, it contains only [Default] and [Custom]. The latter is intended just to be a visual cue for you the InDesign user. Change anything below and the preset becomes [Custom]; you do not need to preselect [Custom] in order to make any changes below it.

If you more often than not have to change something from its default in the New Document dialog,—maybe your typical document is tabloid sized, includes a standard-sized bleed, has multiple columns, or needs something other than a half inch all around margin—set it up just once and build a preset. Every subsequent document you create will then not require all the manual settings; you’ll be able to select it from the Document Preset menu and have all your options applied. Just set the options once, click the Save Preset button, and give the preset a name in the Save Preset dialog that pops up. Upon clicking OK, you’ll find your customer preset below [Default] in the list, ready for two-click setup of your next document. Build presets for all the different types of documents you create at least once in a while.

Page Size Presets
Hey! Is there a way to customize the Paper Size menu? Another common question, and the answer is yes. The Page Size list contains the most common paper sizes customers told Adobe they use. If they aren’t inclusive of your most common page sizes, tell Adobe; maybe a future edition of InDesign will include your typical page sizes. Until then, you can manually override them by changing the width, height, and/or orientation below the drop-down menu, or you can add your own common sizes to the Page Sizes list. Here’s how:
1. Quit out of InDesign.
2. Open this file in your text editor:
Windows: Program Files\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CS3\Presets\New Doc Sizes.txt
Mac OS: Applications/Adobe InDesign CS3/Presets/New Doc Sizes.txt
3. At the bottom of the file, insert each of your desired page size presets in the following format:
Name[tab]Width[tab]Height. Here’s an example:
Business Card 3.5” 2”
4. Save and close New Doc Sizes.txt. When you open InDesign next, your new options will be in the Page Sizes list. There are other examples in the New Doc Sizes.txt file right above the copyright notice. Remove the semicolons and leading spaces to uncomment the examples and make them selectable page sizes for new documents. The rest of the file contains additional instructions and information you may find useful.

If your custom addition didn’t work, check that you inserted straight inch marks (") instead of curly quote marks (”). If you’re having trouble getting the inch marks (even some text editors do automatic correction now) use i or in in their stead.

Document Templates
Neither document presets nor page size presets can save your manually created live area guides, but a template can. In fact, a template can save everything to do with a particular document—paragraph, character, table, cell, and object styles as well as swatches, dictionary spelling and hyphenation exceptions, columns, and master pages, among other things. I always recommend templates for workflows that frequently employ the same or similar document layouts and styles. Cumulatively, templates can save a massive amount of time over setting up documents manually, and they can be passed around the office or posted on a shared server for simultaneous use by everyone. Templates, in fact, are the key to consistent style usage among workgroups (more on that in Chapter 11, “Efficiency”). If you’ve set up trim area guides or any other document feature likely to be reused on the same page size in the future, save it as a template. Just go to File >Save As, and change the Save As Type drop-down to InDesign CS3 Template. The resulting file will have an .indt extension instead of .indd and will have a slightly different icon. For all intents and purposes, it’s just a standard InDesign document with the sole exception that the .indt extension triggers a slightly different behavior when File >Open is used. Instead of opening the template itself, InDesign will create a new, untitled document based on that template—a duplicate—and will not open the template itself. In the new document you’ll have everything you had in the template—paragraph, character, table, cell, and object styles as well as swatches, dictionary spelling and hyphenation exceptions, columns, and master pages, among other things. The trick is in the way the Open dialog works. Note the three Open As options at the bottom (see Figure K). Original opens the original file, whether an InDesign document, template, or Interchange Format INX file. Copy generates on-the-fly an unsaved duplicate of the selected document; the original is left untouched, but InDesign creates a new document faithful to the original in every respect. Finally, Normal says to use whatever is default behavior for the specific document type—INDD and INX documents open originals, INDTs create copies. Normal is the default, which means that, when designers in your workgroup need to create new documents from your template, they won’t be editing the template itself. To do that, you must deliberately choose to open the original. Note that when you’re opening documents created in a previous version of InDesign or created in a compatible version of PageMaker (6.0–7.0) or QuarkXPress (3.3–4.1 and QuarkXPress Passport 4.1), a copy will be created regardless of the Open As choice. A template-based workflow is the ideal for any periodical and is usually more efficient and leads to fewer content-destroying mistakes than opening the previous issue’s files, resaving as the next issue’s files, and then replacing content. I’ve seen few other workflows wherein at least one document setup is reused that doesn’t also see a benefit from employing templates.

If you choose the File >New >Document from Template command, it opens an Adobe Bridge window focused on the Templates\InDesign folder created during InDesign or Creative Suite install. Dozens of professionally designed, royalty-free templates are included with InDesign CS3, and you can use them as is or, better, as learning aids. They’re all InDesign template INDT files, so opening them by double-clicking in the Bridge view will have the same effect as opening a template you created using the default Normal option—a new, untitled document based on the template.

Layout Adjustment
This isn’t strictly a master page thing, but layout adjustment is most often used in conjunction with master pages, so it makes the most sense to bring it up here.After initially creating the document, you can change its type—facing or nonfacing—as well as the paper size and orientation with File >Document Setup. Using Layout >Margins and Columns, you can also alter the margins, number of columns, and column gutter width. Finally, on master pages, margin guides can be manually dragged to new positions (if unlocked). None of these changes will adapt your page objects to the new conditions by default. If you want your text frames to expand or contract to fit new margins, to automatically reduce or increase the number of columns they contain according to changes you’ve made in Margins and Columns, or if you want other objects to adjust to the new document layout without you having to do it all by hand, turn to Layout Adjustment on the Layout menu (see Figure L).

Layout Adjustment does a decent job of reformatting page (and master page) objects to conform to new document conditions such as new page sizes and orientations and margin and column guide relocation. Frames will be moved and resized as needed to adapt to the new layout if Enable Layout Adjustment is activated prior to making the layout change. Here is what the options mean:

Snap Zone The maximum distance an object must be from one or more margin or column guides or the page edge to be a candidate for repositioning or resizing with Layout Adjustment. For instance, with a value of 0.25 inches, a master text frame directly on four margins will be adjusted but a graphic frame 0.5 inches from the nearest guide will not be adjusted.
Allow Graphics and Groups to Resize Vector objects, frames, and groups of objects will be repositioned by Layout Adjustment regardless of whether they fall within the snap zone. This option determines whether they may also be scaled to better fit. For instance, if converting an 8.5x11-inch document from portrait to landscape, should a full-page background graphic frame follow suit to become 11x8.5 inches with its content scaled accordingly?
Allow Ruler Guides to Move Manually created ruler guides—column center points, for example—can be moved to maintain their relative position to margin and column guides with this option checked.
Ignore Ruler Guide Alignments Throughout working on a document, we often create numerous ruler guides that are not significantly related to the layout. Because layout adjustment considers all guides in its calculations, these nonessential guides can cause it confusion, leading to improperly adjusted layouts. Checking this option tells InDesign to ignore them, factoring in only page edges and column and margin guides when repositioning and scaling objects.
Ignore Object and Layer Locks This option is an easier alternative to unlocking locked layers and combing through a document looking for any objects whose positions have been selectively locked. Enabling this will reposition and/or scale objects regardless of their individual or layer lock statuses.

Multiple Page Sizes
Since long before computers, there has always been a need to create documents that include multiple page sizes or orientations. With the rise of VDP and digital-to-press output making high-quality, one-off productions an affordable option, multiple page sizes and orientations in documents have become more common and more desirable. But the software has never caught up with the need— even in the cutting edge of page production, InDesign CS3. QuarkXPress, since version 6.0, has done multiple page sizes in one “project,” but it’s not truly the same thing. You see, QuarkXPress merely allows multiple, disconnected layouts to be saved in the same file—it’s an MDF, a multiple document format, similar to the way Excel allows multiple spreadsheets to be saved in a single Excel document. QuarkXPress, even in the latest version as of this writing, still won’t allow two or more differently sized pages in a single, continuous layout. In close to a hundred InDesign training, consulting, and speaking engagements, I’m hard-pressed to recall a single one in which I wasn’t asked if InDesign could do multiple page sizes in one document. There’s a lot of need for that feature in our field. Gatefold covers and ads in magazines are still produced separately from surrounding pages and then inserted at bindery time. Maps, charts, and spreadsheets in proposals and technical books are still separate InDesign documents. Landscape content in a portrait-orientation book still forces designers to work sideways, either trying to read at 90 degrees or rotating their work for every change or onscreen copy proof—and that often requires grouping and ungrouping for many edits just to retain object relational positions. Frankly, it’s ridiculous. That’s why I did something about it.
First, let’s look at the workaround we—design, prepress, press professionals—have come to accept as the “only” way of creating multiple page sizes or orientations in a single document.

Book Panel
InDesign only allows a single page orientation and size per document. If most of the document is to be 8.5x11 inches portrait (tall), then it’s all going to be 8.5x11 inches portrait. The workaround to this limitation has been “booking” multiple documents together to (somewhat) behave as one. This isn’t just InDesign, by the way. Print pros have been using this same workaround for two decades in QuarkXPress, PageMaker, and other layout applications. We’ll look at the functionality of InDesign Book documents and the Book panel in Chapter 9, “Documents,” but in essence, an InDesign Book document (INDB) is a paperclip that links multiple, otherwise completely self-contained InDesign documents together. Via the Book panel, page and section numbers, styles, indexes, and tables of contents can be synchronized among all the booked files. They can also be preflighted, packaged, exported to PDF, and printed simultaneously as if they were a single document. That is very cool and powerful, as are the synchronizing functions. The Book panel, though, was developed for the purpose of managing longer documents. It enables, for instance, this book to be written in chapters. As I’m writing this chapter, others are with my editors Sam and Karen, some are already with the compositor being poured into the layout template, and still other chapters are on their way back to me for final layout proof. When all the chapters are done, the fact that they’re booked will keep page numbers, the TOC, and the index correct, ensuring that Chapter 2 begins numbering where Chapter 1 leaves off and so on. Because the Book panel has all these features, it can be used to insert an oversized or rotated page into the middle of a long document. For instance, if page 26 is a fold-out tabloid diagram among 47 other 8.5x11-inch pages, the Book panel can insert the tabloid as page 26 and keep the rest of the page numbers in synch. The catch is that they must all be separate documents. Pages 1 through 25 must be one 8.5x11-inch InDesign document, page 26 a single 11x17-inch page document, and then pages 27 through 48 have to be a third document because they’re 8.5x11 inches. If editorial says the tabloid diagram belongs two pages previous, you’ll have to pull two pages out of the first document and insert them in the third to make it work. Of course, that’s only the simplest of scenarios. Many longer documents have several charts, diagrams, fold-outs, or other oversized pages. Everywhere that the page size differs requires a new InDesign document. Beginning to see how this can get ugly? Add in the fact that each of those documents has its own localized paragraph, character, object, table, and cell styles as well as hyphenation exceptions, swatches, ink settings, master pages, and a whole lot more and every document exponentially increases the risk of mistakes making it to press. All of these can be synchronized via the Book panel, but that must be done deliberately and correctly. Someone forgets or doesn’t synch correctly, and…. Well, I’m sure you can imagine—or maybe you don’t have to imagine. If you need to deal with two or three different booked documents as a result of page size or orientation differences only once in a while, use the Book panel method. If you need it more often, or just don’t want to add another layer of complication to your workflow, there’s another option.

Page Control Plug-InUntil November 2006, the Book panel option was the only workaround to managing multiple page sizes or orientations in a single document created in InDesign. Then DTP Tools and I released the Page Control plug-in, which works in InDesign CS, CS2, and CS3. With it, you can resize any or all pages—singly or in spreads—change from landscape to portrait, change the vertical alignment of pages within a spread, resize master pages, set document pages to automatically resize according to their assigned masters, and change the size of the pasteboard for more working room—and all of this in one, single InDesign document that can be packaged, printed, exported to PDF, and so on without risky or inconvenient workarounds (see Figure M). And, it prints. Prior to releasing Page Control, we held a public beta period in which we asked printers in the U.S., Australia, and Europe, among other places and groups of professionals, to test it out thoroughly. Whether printed natively from InDesign, printed from an InDesign-exported PDF, or printed first to PostScript, documents containing a full range of different page sizes sailed through RIPs without complaint. As of this writing, Page Control has been available and selling to design and prepress professionals all over the world for several months; I have yet to hear a complaint from anywhere within the for-print process.

We even created a free Page Control Reader plug-in that enables anyone without the full Page Control plug-in to view, edit, save, and output InDesign documents containing multiple page sizes. (Hint, hint, you service bureaus and printers.) If you create documents with different page sizes in a single document, or just want to enlarge your pasteboard, there’s a 14-day try-out version of Page Control included on this book’s download page in the Chapter 7 folder. The BIN file is for Mac installs and the MSI for Windows. Upon installation, the Page Control commands will appear on the Pages panel’s flyout menu. The same installers will also set up Page Control Reader.

to be continued in part V..........

How to Create Pages in InDesign? Part III

continued from part II.....

When exporting a PDF for press, you’ll want to ensure that the PDF includes the slug area. As you can see in Figure F, the Marks and Bleeds pane of the Export Adobe PDF dialog has a check box at the bottom to Include Slug Area. Check that for press output, but uncheck it when publishing a PDF to your website or intranet for digital distribution.

The Print dialog’s Marks and Bleed pane has the same box (see Figure G) if you’re outputting straight from InDesign or printing to PostScript. When printing to a desktop printer, you typically only want to print the trim size, so uncheck it. However, if you’d like to scale the entire design to include the slug, bleed, and any marks, check the appropriate options, and then, on the Setup pane, activate the Scale to Fit option. Note that the entire output will shrink down to fit within the chosen paper size (and respect any rebates), including the slug and so forth. In both locations you can also add needed marks and symbols via the Printer’s Marks check boxes as well as control type, weight, and offset (distance from artwork) of the crop, bleed, and registration marks.

Bleed: Bleeding designs are run on sheets larger than the intended deliverable page size and then trimmed in very large stacks on a guillotine or other type of cutter. Cutter operators are punctilious (they have to be; they have 10 fingers relying on their attention to detail). Still, they’re human (as evidenced by the number of cutter operators at annual conventions answering to the nickname of “Lefty”). Moreover, sheets of paper have a tendency to shift ever so slightly as a blade is rammed down through a stack. Even a one one-thousandth of an inch shift can leave an ugly white strip down one or more sides of an edge-to-edge print piece that didn’t account for such possibilities. That would ruin an otherwise beautiful design. Hedge against this common problem by drawing beyond the trim. Don’t stop image frames or filled objects at the page edge; keep them going out 1⁄8 inch. Look at Figure G1, the same document with and without bleeds. See the difference? The one that extends the art to fill the bleed area can’t be marred by paper slivers; if the cutter is off enough to cause slivers with an 1⁄8-inch bleed, the operator will send the job for a print rerun anyway.

Create a bleed guide around any side that will run ink up to the trim edge—it’s usually easier to just set up a four-sided bleed guide even if fewer edges will bleed. When sending a bleeding document to press, always bleed the artwork. Get the desired bleed area size from your print service provider; when in doubt, use the industry standard 1⁄8 inch or 0.125 inch. Then, as you design, account for the bleed area by extending objects and colors out to the red bleed guide. If you use a background image, crop it at the bleed guide, not at the trim. Depending on the image, that may require you to enlarge it in InDesign or even go back to Photoshop or Illustrator and add more space around the focal point of the picture. As you get in the habit of using bleeds and bleed guides in InDesign, you’ll learn to plan for the bleed when prepping artwork. As you noticed in the preceding text, adding, resizing, and outputting bleed to print or PDF is controlled in the same place as whether to include the slug area. You’ve got additional control over bleed, however (see Figure H). You can use the document bleed settings as defined in New Document or Document Properties, or you can override them (or correct for their absence) by specifying new bleed values in the Bleed and Slug section of the Print or Export to PDF Marks and Bleed panes.

Live Area
Similar to bleed, live area compensates for paper shifts on a cutter, but on the inside of the trim. If pages or the blade slip during a cut and a bleeding print shows paper along one edge, it therefore follows that the opposite edge of the page will lose some of its artwork. It’s even more important that the design elements critical to communicating the message of a design be inset from the trim edges than it is that background colors extend out beyond. You don’t, for instance, want the last digit of an ad’s sales phone number chopped off. (I’ve seen that exact thing, actually, within an ad in a major, one million plus circulation magazine; the client showed it to me when my agency was hired to take over from the firm that had created and placed that ad.) The buffer space of the live area is, like the bleed buffer, typically 1⁄8 inch or 0.125 inches. It can vary, though. Product packaging labels and low linescreen boxes, for example, often need 0.25 or even more distance between trim and live area (and trim and bleed). Consult your print service provider.

I wish I could show you a dialog where you can create a live area guide (orange would be a nice choice in guides), but I can’t. InDesign doesn’t have such a feature, although I keep lobbying for one. Instead, Adobe considers the margin guides to define the live area despite the fact that they default to half an inch around all four sides instead of an eighth of an inch. Margins can be used to represent the live area—it makes sense in some respects given the way Adobe built InDesign’s margins feature—but there are some drawbacks to it as well. InDesign allows you to put anything you want within, outside, or crossing the margins—so does every other professional layout application and most consumer-grade layout tools as well. Margin guides, in fact, matter very little in InDesign. The only place they really have an effect is in automated text frame creation. When you check the Master Text Frame option while creating a new document, the resulting master page text frame will be sized and placed according to the margin guides. When you’re autoflowing multipage placed text, new text frames will also be generated according to the area defined by the margins. Other than that, their function is primarily as a visual guide to you. It’s the automatic text frame sizing that also foils their use as live area guides. Alive area should be, under most conditions, 0.125 inches in from the trim edges all around. If you use automatic text frames, though, that puts text flush with the live area guides. That’s not so much a problem for printing— the live area guides define the minimum area that you can be sure will print and cut intact—but more of a design issue. Copy running flush or too close to the edge looks bad. Readers need white space along the edges of paper to grip the page or book as well as to give their eyes a place to rest. So, what’s the verdict? Margins as live area guides or not? If every page will be manually created with individually placed frames, then you should be good to go using margin guides as live area guides. If you’re using any kind of automatic text frame creation (master text frame, autoflowing text), then don’t use margins as live area guides.

Instead, do this:

1. Select Ruler Guides from the Layout menu and change the color to something other than the defaults: Cyan (guide color), Magenta (margin guides), Violet (column guides), Fiesta (bleed guides), Grid Blue (slug guides), White, Light Gray, and Black (see Figure I). Personally, I like green for my live area guides because it stands out against most colors without being too similar to other types of guides.

2. Go to the document master page(s) for the document and drag horizontal and vertical guides from the rulers for each edge (four for nonfacing documents, eight guides for both pages in the spread of a facing-pages document). Notice how they’re now green.
3. Unlock guides by unchecking the View >Grids & Guides >Lock Guides toggle command.
4. Using the Control or Transform panel, position unlocked guides 0.125 inches in from the page edges on all outside edges; with bound documents, you’ll probably want more space on the bind edges. Those guides will define your live area.
5. Deselect all guides with Cmd+Shift+A/Ctrl+Shift+A and return new guides to their default color (Cyan) with Layout >Ruler Guides again. With separate live area guides, you can now use the margin guides for their intended purpose— limiting content and enabling white space. As you design, keep all important elements inside the green guides, extend all bleeding objects out to the bleed guide, and you’ll be safe from misaligned cuts. Still, it seems like a lot of work to set up bleed, slug, and especially live area guides for every new document, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be cool if there were an easier way? There is.

to be continued ......... in part IV

How to Create Pages in InDesign? Part II

continue from part I ...............

Ruler Origin
Ruler orientation is also affected by choice of facing or nonfacing pages. Although you can override this in Edit >Preferences >Units & Increments, by default InDesign orients the horizontal ruler’s zero-point to the top-left corner of the spread. Thus, in an 8.5 x 11-inch document of nonfacing pages, the right edge of every page is at 8.5 inches. With facing pages, though, only even pages and page one end at 8.5 inches. Page three and all odd pages (except page one) begin at 8.5 inches (the spine) and end at 17. Positioning an object onto the right page of a spread using the Control or Transform panels, for instance, requires X positions greater than 8.5 inches. The Origin field in the Units & Increments preferences can change the horizontal ruler behavior (see Figure D). Spread is the default and works as described previously, beginning at the top left of the left page and growing across the entire spread. Page restarts the numbering for each page— at the spine, the right-read page starts over again at 0 inches. Finally, setting the Ruler Units Origin to Spine orients the ruler zero-point on the spine itself; pages to the right of the spine get positive measurements while pages to the left of the spine have negative measurements emanating from the spine.

Page Layout
If you graphic designer readers are considering skipping this section because you believe bleeds and slugs are in your print service providers’ sphere of concern rather than yours, don’t. Failure to create proper bleeds is among the most common reasons designers’ printed output is flawed and service providers charge for cleanup time and simply kick the job back as unacceptable. You print providers shouldn’t skip this section either. While I doubt I’ll teach you anything you don’t already know about bleed, live area, and slugs and why they’re important, you might learn a different way to explain these concepts to designers so they get it. Bleed is when artwork or text runs to the page trim edge. The cover of this book is a good example. Notice how the ink bleeds off all four edges of the cover leaf. The bleed area is how far beyond the page ink must extend in order to safely ensure against slivers of paper appearing in the finished piece should pages misalign on the cutter.

Let’s define the terms we’re talking about visually. In (Figure D1) you can see a trifold brochure.The blue guide box is the slug area. Inside that, with the artwork running right up to them, are the red bleed area guides. Next, the paper edges—turned green in the figure for easy identification—are the trim, the expected final paper size post-print, post-trim, post-finishing. Finally, within the page are the magenta margin guides that form the document live area (sort of). The white area beyond is, of course, the pasteboard.
Slug
Slug is a nebulous term that can be applied to a lot of different things. In my travels and two decades in the business I’ve noted its usage change regionally and by specialization within each of the print, prepress, and design industries. Quite a few people use the term slug to reference headers and footers or parts of them, like the page number. (The page number is properly called a folio, not to be confused with folio referencing a folded sheet of paper comprising two leafs or spreads.)

In this context, slug refers to any information that must accompany a design through prepress and print but that will be trimmed off during finishing. What should you put in the slug area? Whatever the designer or print service provider may need. Job name, job number, document title, InDesign filename, client name and contact info, date, designer’s name and contact info, color bars, short knock-knock jokes for your service provider’s amusement—anything can go in there. What should go in there is whatever is needed by the designer, the prepress bureau, the printer, the finishing and bindery service, and whoever will retain the film or plates generated from the artwork (if there are film or plates). It’s a great place to put special instructions to providers down the line, too. For instance, if your job contains a spot color intended to be a varnish, in addition to setting up the ink properly in Ink Manager, note in both the job ticket and the slug area which ink is the varnish. Even if the prepress and press operators miss the note on the job ticket, they’ll see it in the slug because the slug will output to every piece of film and every printed page. If you’re running film for the job, include enough information that, a year or five down the road, you’ll be able to immediately identify the job, client, designer, and corresponding digital document. Many a wasted hour has been spent at swapping sheets of film on a light table trying to figure out which page 14 cyan plate goes with which yellow, magenta, and black plates. Before sending a job to press, I typically add one small table into the slug area above the page and another table below. In the top, I include the job name as given to my print and finishing providers, the page number, the date, my account number(s) at the service provider (for proper billing and tracking), my name and contact information (so I can be called or emailed about something without a trip to the customer database), and any special instructions echoed from the job ticket. Within the lower table is information for my reference, including internal job name and number, client name, digital document title and filename, and authoring application and version. I often send PDFs to press, so I want to know on the film if I should be searching archive DVD-ROMs for an InDesign, QuarkXPress, Illustrator, or some other type of document and what version of that software I used in case whatever version I’m currently using has trouble translating from older ones (InDesign had that problem with version 1.0 and 1.5 documents). Knowing the authoring application and version can also help my prepress provider understand the document and any unique RIP considerations (once in a while it’s a factor, even with properly made PDFs). Of course, I put all this information on the master page rather than doing it manually page by page. Marks and symbols like crop marks, bleed marks, and registration marks vital to the proper output of your job will, by definition, wind up in the slug area. Setting up a slug area is simple. When you’re creating a new document (or later in Document Setup), clicking the More Options button reveals the Bleed and Slug area (see Figure E). The chain link button on the right will mirror all four sides’ measurements, which is usually not necessary. In most cases, you want to put all your slug information on one or, at most, two sides of the output. Your service providers will often add additional marks and symbols or their own tracking information, and you want to leave them space in which to do so. Additionally, because the slug will print on film and paper, too generous a slug area can unnecessarily enlarge the required substrates, potentially increasing the cost of the job. Slug areas should only be large enough to hold the required information comfortably.

to be continued............. in part III