Adobe InDesign CS3 - Manual (Page 411)

INDESIGN CS3
User Guide
404
See also
“About flattening” on page 404
Flattening transparent artwork
About flattening
If your document or artwork contains transparency, to be output it usually needs to undergo a process called
flattening. Flattening divides transparent artwork into vector-based areas and rasterized areas. As artwork becomes
more complex (mixing images, vectors, type, spot colors, overprinting, and so on), so does the flattening and its
results.
Flattening may be necessary when you print or when you save or export to other formats that don’t support trans-
parency. To retain transparency without flattening when you create PDF files, save your file as Adobe PDF 1.4
(Acrobat 5.0) or later.
You can specify flattening settings and then save and apply them as transparency flattener presets. Transparent
objects are flattened according to the settings in the selected flattener preset.
Note: Transparency flattening cannot be undone after the file is saved.
Overlapping art is divided when flattened.
For more information on transparency output issues, see the Print Service Provider Resources page of the Adobe
Solutions Network (ASN) (English only), available on the
Adobe website .
About transparency flattener presets
If you regularly print or export documents that contain transparency, you can automate the flattening process by
saving flattening settings in a transparency flattener preset. You can then apply these settings for print output as well
as for saving and exporting files to PDF 1.3 (Acrobat 4.0) and EPS and PostScript formats. In addition, in Illustrator
you can apply them when saving files to earlier versions of Illustrator or when copying to the clipboard; in InDesign
you can also apply them when exporting to SVG format; in Acrobat, you can also apply them when optimizing PDFs.
These settings also control how flattening occurs when you export to formats that don’t support transparency.