Exporting a PDF quickly and easily

When you open the File Menu and choose Export, InDesign gives you the option of exporting as an Adobe PDF Print, or PDF Interactive. And as I said earlier, I have a whole title here in the online training library about Interactive PDF's. Here I'm just going to focus on the PDF print format. I'll click Save and up comes the Export Adobe PDF dialogue box. And there are a ton of options in this dialogue box. Don't worry, I'll cover most of them in this chapter and the next. But right now I'm just going to show you the basic process.

I'm going to choose an Adobe PDF preset from this pop up menu up here. In fact, I'm going to choose PDFX1A. Then, I'm going to make sure the View PDF after exporting check box is turned on. I like that because I like to see the PDF open in Acrobat when it's done. And now I'm about to click Export. But before I do, I want you to pay attention to this little area way up here at the top of the screen. To the right of these little icons. Up in the area called the Application Bar. Okay? You watching? I'm going to click the Export button and you'll see there's a little animation playing up there.

That animation tells you that InDesign is exporting the PDF in the background. That's so that you can keep working while InDesign is exporting. It's really helpful. As soon as the PDF is successfully exported, the animation stops and InDesign opens the PDF in Acrobat. That looks pretty good. I'm going to close the PDF and go back to InDesign because I want to show you one other way that you can see what's going on in the background. And that is to go to the Window menu, choose the Utilities submenu, and then choose, Background Tasks.

This panel is really helpful if you need to export a bunch of PDFs in a row, because you can watch the export progress here. I should point out that in earlier versions of InDesign, you had to make this panel wider, or else everything would get all squished and you couldn't read it. In this case I'm simply going to move it out of the way. Now speaking of exporting a lot of PDFs, let me show you a shortcut. I'm going to hold down the Shift key on my keyboard and then I'm going to go to the File menu. Choose the Adobe PDF Presets submenu and then choose one of these PDF presets.

When I do that, InDesign asks me where I want to save my PDF and what I want to call it. And then when I click OK, it just saves it. You don't even have to look at that huge export options dialog box. You see, there it is in the Background Tasks panel, exporting away. I can even click this little x to cancel the export, which can be handy sometimes.