Expert: Glen Demers - 3/22/2009

Question
Hello,
I work in the graphic design field at a full service sign shop. We do large format printing, vinyl lettering, vehicle wraps and so on. I have been approached by many of our customers for logo design and I am pretty fluent with Illustrator and other various vector editing programs.
Recently I was approached by a long time customer and friend to design a poetry book. I have never done anything like this before but I agreed to give it a whirl. I contacted the printer which they have decided to use and he informed me that the best way to submit the completed book was in a pDF format with all the pages in one document.
Being naive as I am to the world of binded printing I started all the design in Illustrator thinking for some reason that if I put each page on it's own layer I could then export the document as a PDF and each layer would become it's own page in the PDF document. Don't know why I thought that but I think in Photoshop you can do it that way. Well Not in Illustrator or at least not to my knowledge. So I have InDesign but have no formal training with the program. I received my degree a few years ago and at that time Quark was still the standard for multiple page layouts and therefore that is what we were taught. So I try to import the illustrator files into InDesign but everytime it seems like it is rasterizing these documents at like 2.5 dpi HAH. You can't make out any of the type at all. So my question is should I just rebuild the pages in Indesign by importing the backround images and then just retyping the text body? The book is going to be full color so each page has images on them and I just thought that there may be some way to work back and forth between Illustrator and InDesign.
I was impoting the document using the place option in the file menu. Maybe there is another way of doing it. I tried Drag and Drop but nothing.
Let me know if you have any advice.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks,
Rob Morris

Answer
Hi Robert,

You can import Illustrator files into InDesign without a problem as either .eps or ai files, or even pdf's. Since you have already set the type in Illustrator, there is no need to redo it in InDesign. In the view menu go to Display Performance and select high quality. You can switch back to fast view if you need the speed because high quality will slow down redraws some - it depends on your machine and document complexity.

Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

For more InDesign tips please visit our help pages <a href="http://www.bestprintingonline.com/indesign.htm">here</a>