how can I improve work flow? re: designing news mag w/ ads

[that mike guy]

Hey,

I reeeaallly need to figure out an easier way to do this.

I design a monthly magazine with hundreds of ads, many of these advertisers are recurring customers.

I create the magazine template in Indesign.
For the ads, I create them in Indesign as well.

The main problem is, half the mag is in color, and half is in black & white.
As for the ads, some editions the ads will run in color, other times in black & white, so i need to create them all in color in the first place.

The time consuming thing is, once the ads are ready to go, the only way i can grayscale the black & white ads is to convert all the ads to eps format, select either CMYK or Grayscale, then drop them in to the mag, one at a time. And i cant place the ads in as eps files, because...well, that would just be a mess.

This is the biggest pain in the ass, going through over 300 ads and converting each and everyone to either CMYK or grayscale. I can't even run a script to do this, because sometimes there's a missing font, broken link, etc...

whats the solution? When i make a pdf of the mag to send to the printers, isnt there a way to choose which pages are B&W and which are color when I export it? Or should i use a different file format for the ads?

Any help would be appreciated.

[SurfPark]

The only way to control color on the PDF side is to limit the colors via InDesign swatches. Since your ads are EPS, those colors are managed separately than those of the rest of the PDF...meaning the you'll have to change the color in each EPS.

Even with a script running, you'd have to put all the ads into a queue for it to run, which would still be time consuming.

Do you know which pages will be b/w before they print? Why can't all the pages be created in color and tell the printer to run page __ through __ as b/w?

[greyghost]

For quality purposes, I wouldn't just print color pages as black and white. Contrasts don't show up so well, like if you had a blue background to an ad and the text were in red, print that in BW and you get... all dark gray!

I don't know of an easier way. I've been designing publications in both color and black and white for many years, the only way to do it is one ad at a time. :(
Sorry.

[emmerse]

do the ads have to be created in InDesign?

my thought would be to create all the ads in photoshop, with one layer set in color, then duplicate that set and make the layers b/w (still working in cmyk, though).
Then point your InDesign document to the .psds. When you need to switch back and forth between color and b/w, just hide or show the layer set you need. I believe InDesign CS2 can look at each set individually, so you wouldn't even need to resave the psd each time - just point the color or b/w set.

if this isn't an option, you can export a range of pages in your .pdf as grayscale, but as mentioned, this will cause contrast problems. Then you export the color pages like normal and piece the two pdfs together in Acrobat. But, from what I've found, printers prefer the "No Conversion" option in the output options area of your .pdf export.

[urstwile]

Well, here's a couple of thoughts that might help.

Create a folder of images for the color versions of the ads, and a separate folder for the grayscale image versions of the ads. For any type you've created for the ads using color, make sure to name those something specific. Duplicate any of those swatches, but modify them to be whatever the equivalent grayscale value would be.

Then when it comes time to make the switch to black and white, swap out the color versions of the images with the black and white ones, and the color versions of the swatches with the black and white swatches.

I don't know if this would make it any easier for you, but that's what comes to mind for me.

[Broacher]

There's an easy way to get reliable composite greyscale (or composite CMYK) out of pages that placed EPS or PDFs in them without having to go back and do anything to the placed images.

Basically, as you place these files, you set the transparency to 99.9%. By doing this, you automatically are including these files in the flattening process, without effecting their separated colours (everything gets rounded to the original numbers). Then when you're exporting to a PDF, simply select Composite Grey as the output choice for the pages you want in greyscale, and violas.

Here's a good description of the process with screenshots on Nick Hodge's site (he does great stuff):

http://www.nickhodge.com/mn8/article/715/

[emmerse]

^^genius

[that mike guy]

thanks for all the help, this gives me a lot of ideas on how to improve things..

As for the other issue, The time consuming part of placing over 300 ads in a magazine, isn't there a quicker way of doing it, other than placing each ad one by one?

The magazine template rarely changes, so i would like to figure out a system where i can dump all the ads in at one shot, and have them fall in the ad spaces reserved for each ad...

Is this asking too much lol? As it is now, it takes me almost 2 work days to place all 300 ads and position them.

any tips?

[steve2112]

The next version of Indesign has more advanced placement features like set up the boxes them importing all the pictures in order to each box in order. You can create one pdf of all the adds and then import the PDF and import all the pages. Faster but not completely efficient but that is what I do with large groups of files.

steve

[Fredonia2k]

I wonder if there isn't some way to do this with XML... Not that I could help you figure it out, because I can barely spell XML.

[budafist]

You could always name your ads as page1ad1 in your Indesign layout and then update the links. I do that when I'm laying up impositions that are the same number of pages etc.

Then again, you might take a while renaming the files each time, so scrap that idea...

[steve2112]

hmm you can probably do it with mail merge stuff in indy along with caref naming you might be able to set something up. I do not do much merging except for send tickets and ncr sort of number through the copier.

Steve

[Broacher]

??

Okay, if the layout stays essentially the same, for the ads, if you use links, and keep the names consistent, it's easy. Just create a copy of the links directory for each issue. You might consider a file naming scheme to get something like, "132_tlq.pdf" to mean page 132, top left quarter, that sort of thing. Then just rename your new ads to fit their placement and relink to the new ad directory.

Or am I missing something here?

[Fredonia2k]

There is no reason that shouldn't work.

[that mike guy]

??

Okay, if the layout stays essentially the same, for the ads, if you use links, and keep the names consistent, it's easy. Just create a copy of the links directory for each issue. You might consider a file naming scheme to get something like, "132_tlq.pdf" to mean page 132, top left quarter, that sort of thing. Then just rename your new ads to fit their placement and relink to the new ad directory.

Or am I missing something here?

that is an awesome idea! .... i think.....

one problem though, even though the layout stays 'essentially' the same, sometimes it does change....

for example, we may run an extra 4 pages for one edition.....or an advertiser will include an editorial.. or suddenly we'll have 2 extra half page or a couple last-minute full page ads...... so using that file naming scheme might cause some problems, even though it is the best idea so far...