Printing the Document

Printing the Document

When you press Ctrl-P, InDesign displays the Print dialog box. There are so many features packed into this dialog box that Adobe had to break it up into eight different panes, each listed along the left side of the dialog box: General, Setup, Marks and Bleeds, Output, Graphics, Color Management, Advanced, and Summary.

Printers

Before you go anywhere in the Print dialog box, you’ve got to make one or two important decisions. First, you must choose from the options on the Printer pop- up menu, which lists the printers you have installed on your computer. When you choose a printer, InDesign looks to the printer driver to see what PPD (PostScript Printer Description) file is associated with that printer, and it displays it—grayed out—in the PPD pop-up menu. In the case of a non-PostScript device, InDesign leaves this pop-up menu blank.

General

The General pane of the Print dialog box contains basic printing features: which pages do you want to print, how many copies do you want, and how do you want them to come out of the printer (see Figure 2. 50).

Copies

Enter the number of copies of the page you want to print in the Copies field. You can print up to 9999 copies of your publication.

Collate

When you turn on the Collate option, InDesign prints the range of pages you’ve specified, in order, for each copy of the publication you print. This makes for much slower printing. When you print multiple copies of a page, your printer only needs to process each page once (and then prints multiple copies of the page using the same image); when you turn on the Collate option, your printer must process each page once for every copy of the print job.

Reverse Order

When you print a multipage document, do you want the first page to come out first or last? Turning on the Reverse Order check box tells InDesign to print the last page first, then print “backwards” to the first page. You’ll want to turn this on if your pages come out of the laser printer face up.

Page Ranges

Turn on the All Pages option to print all of the pages in the publication. To print a range of pages, turn on the Range option. Enter the page range in the Range field as shown in the following Table.

Sequence

To print even and odd pages, select the All Pages option from the Sequence pop-up menu; to print even pages, select Even Pages Only; and to print odd pages select Odd Pages Only. These choices affect all page ranges, including page ranges you’ve entered in the Range field.

Print Master Pages

Sometimes you need to print your master pages instead of your document pages. No problem: Just turn on the Print Master Pages check box. When you do this, you cannot specify page ranges—InDesign prints all the master pages in the document.

Print Blank Pages

What happens when you print a three-page document that has nothing on page 2? By default, only pages 1 and 3 print out. If you want the blank page 2 to print, too, you’d better turn on the Print Blank Pages check box.

Print

Finally press the Print button to print the document