Several PM/ID/QXP-savvy readers wrote to me privately expressing concern about the methods espoused for opening ID docs in PM.

Here's what they said:

"What bothers me about [placing ID files as a PDF, TIF, or EPS in PM] is this is exactly the sort of thing that service bureaus do to InDesign files to get them to print in QuarkXPress and then files don't print correctly. Especially when any transparency has been applied. Now I'm not saying that PageMaker would fail under these circumstances, but it's really risky business."

I then asked an ID engineer what he thought:

"This is not a proper workflow, and should only be used as a last resort or as a special-purpose graphic. This is *not* a reasonable way for PageMaker/QuarkXPress users to print InDesign documents. If they need to do that, why not simply print the PDF?

"Any time you encapsulate a page within an EPS or PDF graphic, and then add that layout to a page in a page layuot app, you're increasing the complexity of the print job--while making it less reliable at the same time. Worse, if you *export* the document containing the placed PDFs as
a PDF (thereby 'nesting' a PDF within a PDF), you're likely to run into PostScript 'limitcheck' errors (on 'savelevel'). Remember how it's bad to nest an EPS within an EPS within an EPS? The same thing is even more true when it comes to PDF--you'll hit the limitcheck errors roughly 2x quicker than with EPS."

So there you have it. As for the best way to opne ID files in PM? I think you'd be better off avoiding it by using ID -- right now Adobe is offering PM users a $299 upgrade to ID.

--Pamela Pfiffner, editor in chief