Nick Hodge, an Adobe Engineer of some sort, has published an excellent series of short articles related to InDesign, titled Adobe InDesign Prepress Techniques. He describes a variety of pdf-centric moves with the program that I felt warranted linking.

Immediately I've incorporated some of the moves. A recent flury of printing projects at work has had me sending a bunch of different jobs. One job - sent to Montana - utilized InDesign's transparency feature. At first, even our brand new color copier couldn't rip it. After following some of Hodge's tips, things were better.

Stumped, I followed the print-postscript-distill workflow and had better results. Interestingly, however, the gigantic printer completing the job hadn't known about the trick that allowed the job to print. They said they had a number of workarounds. (Namely assigning elements to different layers and playing out sequentially.) Although this gets there, who wants to sent the original application files? Not me...

I sent the link to a friend and we got to chatting about it. His take was that why should you complicate the layout file, just do it in photoshop and tiff export. First - speeed. Second - adaptability.

Layout files - when being developed - change. You constantly have the toggle between PS and your layout. Change. Save. Reimport. Your guessing where composites really need to be. Because of these two factors transparency has benefits.

It seems however, just like pdf, operator training in distilling the file the right way is the biggest hurdle. Hodge's series is a step in the right direction..

Read them and save yourself time and headaches.