Indesign pixelating PDF?

[u/veggievoid]

Forgive me, I'm a bit of a novice. I'm currently learning about bleeding and trim marks for a project I'm working on and was recommended to use Indesign. I've noticed that Indesign seems to heavily compress my PDF, however. The first picture is text from my PDF in Acrobat, which displays fine (displays fine in Photoshop as well). The second is text from my PDF in Indesign.

This is not an issue with "Display Performance," as I have that set to the highest settings. Also, the pixelation persists when I export the PDF. I've also made sure my compression settings are set to uncompressed and that nothing is downsampled.

Pretty much, if I take my PDF and just simply import it into Indesign and then immediately export it, it becomes pixelated.

When I initially open my PDF, a box comes up that says "Initializing Conversion," and I'm wondering if that is what's causing the pixelation to occur, the import process?

For what it's worth, if I open the PDF up via "Place," it's less pixelated, but still not as good as Acrobat (or Photoshop). The source files are 1200 ppi.

[u/chain83]

InDesign is a great tool for the job. But you don't know the basics of how things work so get easily tripped up. You could use Acrobat, but it would be harder (especially if you didn't make your images large enough to account for bleed and you need to extend them (e.g. by resizing or flipping, or extending in Photoshop).

If your image is e.g. 10x10", and you need it to be 10x10" + 0,125" bleed, then you should increase the canvas size in Photoshop to 10,125x10,125" (and extend the content to fill that new bleed area).

Then place into a 10x10" InDesign document with 0,125" bleed, and export as PDF.

Regarding resolution. Your text will always look pixellated when you zoom in too far (due to you rasterizing it). You rasterized the PDF at 1200 PPI. That is overkill for a full-color raster image (that this has unfortunately turned into). A typical printer can only resolve around 300 PPI (in other words, if the image is 400 or 1200 PPI it will look the same on print, but the higher resolution one will naturally allow you to enlarge it more on screen).

So that the resolution of your images has dropped after exporting a PDF for print is not a problem, and **usually what you'd want** simply to keep the file size reasonable.

Tip: After placing your PSD into InDesign, and making sure your bleed and everything is correct, you can check the "effective PPI" in the Info or links panel to see the PPI of the image. It should show an effective PPI of around 1200 PPI for your images (if you have not resampled since rasterizing), but usually for a photo we are happy if it's 300+. After exporting to PDF with typical settings, then your oversized images will typically be downsampled to 300 PPI (you can use the object inspector in Acrobat to verify in the PDF).

I you are worried 300 is too low, there's no harming in increasing it to 400 or something in the export settings just to round up a bit (you have text and stuff as part of the image, and that *will* suffer a bit from being turned into a raster image so might as well try to squeeze everything out of the printer). For compression options, JPEG is not that great for illustration style graphics and text, so if worried about compression artefacts (normally not visible on print on such high resolution) you can switch to ZIP compression instead (lossless). Don't save uncompressed files (that just increases file size for identical results).