InDesign to iPad PDF Preset

Making PDFs that work well on the iPad can be a little tricky, especially as the iOS libraries that read PDF files don’t understand JPG2000 compression. You can easily tell InDesign to not use JPG2000 compression, but Acrobat is a lot more liberal about compressing the hell outta your PDFs.

As a result, I try to do as little tweaking in Acrobat as possible, and I keep it very careful—adding some metadata, perhaps tweaking bookmarks and layers, but nothing major. My PDF files are important; my company makes money selling them (and distributing them far and wide via BitTorrent) and plenty of our customers love reading PDFs on their iPads.

Before I get to Acrobat, I use a specific preset to create my PDFs, developed through trial and error. To save you that time and error, you can download that preset right here:

ID to iPad PDF v1 dirtywords.tv.joboptions (It’s zipped).

A few notes about the particular settings the preset includes:

  • This preset turns all the Layers in your InDesign document into Acrobat layers; so users can hide backgrounds, art boxes, etc. (depending on how you use Layers in InDesign, of course.) You can untick this if you don’t want layered documents.
  • “Embed Page Thumbnails” is disabled because the thumbnails that InDesign creates are lower quality than the ones than Acrobat creates on the fly the first time it loads a PDF.
  • You can safely change the PPI and Image Quality in the Compression tab. Under compression, do NOT use JPG2000 compression for anything; it doesn’t render on any current iPad PDF viewer.
  • If your document includes spot colors, you probably should go to Output -> Ink Manager and tick “All Spots to Process.” (I almost never use spots, so this advice may be inadequate…)
  • There are no security settings set, because I want my customers to be able to hack the documents they buy. You or your clients may feel differently.

Enjoy, and if you find this PDF particularly useful (or have any issues with it!) please let me know.

InDesign to iPad PDF Preset

Published:
27.05.11
Category:
Tips & Tricks
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