What is the purpose of typesetting a Word document with InDesign?

We have a bunch of Word documents that people create using a template that matches our business’s look-and-feel. When we’re done writing the content, we send it to a designer than the typeset the document using InDesign. This ultimately produces a PDF that looks pretty much exactly like the source document (maybe a bit better).

I’m wondering about a couple of things:

  1. What is the purpose of typesetting? Why couldn’t I just auto-generate a PDF?
  2. What do most companies do to generate nice-looking PDFs? It seems like this process takes us forever and we’re spending a decent amount of time and money on it.

Thanks!

Answer

If you can properly embed the fonts, then yes, you could just create the PDF directly from Word.

InDesign is a much more robust page layout product, and offers a designer a much broader set of typographic and page layout tools with plenty of fine-tuning, but if you’re find with the Word version, then technically, you can just convert that to the PDF you want.

DISCLAIMER: The above all pertains to making a PDF for downlaoding/email/electronic sharing. If the PDF is destined for the printer, however, then Word likely won’t cut it. A printer needs to deal with a lot of pre-press tasks to get a file printed and the PDF InDesign creates will be tailored for the print process.

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Rob Sobers , Answer Author : DA01

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