Spot black - Indesign or Quark

[uredsjim]

Hi all, this is my first ever post. I normally read them out of interest when i have a spare 10 mins.

So here we go......

I want to see what everyones opinion is on ID CS4 and quark 7-8 regarding handling a 5th colour black for multiple languages.

We're currently running Quark 6.5 and the company is about to upgrade. Quark 6.5 is straight forward to print a 5th colour but I wanted to know from anyone that's used the above applications for a period of time.

Your input would be very helpful.

 

[Sherbert]

Surely you just add a spot plate in using swatches/colours.

They'll be able to do it! How are you outputting, PDF?

 

[chrisg42]

Spot black - Indesign or Quark

Rather than adding an extra ink, we would just use layers in InDesign to handle different languages/versions. It's then simple to produce composite PDFs for each version and/or separations for the different versions of black plate.

 

[Elgane]

As chrisg42 said, I would go with layers, you put everything that will be common to all languages on a bottom layer and lock it, and everything that will change on layers on top of it. That can be done in either Quark or Indesign, but I do prefer working in Indesign for sure. So many more helpful options, like nested style sheets, variables etc etc.

If you really need a 5th color, you can just add a swatch for a 2nd black and if you ouput to pdf you can just tell it to create it with the option composite leave unchanged in Indesign and your pdf will have an extra plate.

 

[T]

Try this resource. It has a good description on how to set up a fifth color in Quark 6.5 –

Amazon.com: Exploring Digital PrePress: The Art and Technology of Preparing Electronic Files for Printing (Design Exploration Series): Reid Anderson: Books

This is the 2nd time I've seen this link. Are you doing PR for the Reid fellow?

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

We handle languages, using a specific spot colour is the easiest way because you can either map out put it with black or seperately.
I would make a seperate colour for each language.
InD CS4 also has versions, wich might be another way of handling it, communicate with next person in line is key.
We use layers in InDesign. Ising Agfa ApogeeX5 versioning is built in, but does require a well trained prepress operator. (advantage baing that language plates can be combined CMY and K from version)
We have requested that from Agfa this be developed in future to make it even easier to operate.
Hope this was some help.