press baby
Feb. 28th, 2008 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kirkcudbrightThis morning's class on File Basics for Poster and Display Printing turned out to be pretty...basic. It was pretty much a checklist of the 5 most common problems that would cause a printer to bounce your job.
0. Submit PDF. In this day and age, it's pretty much all you need. Their checklist says they want the source files as well, but when I actually submitted actual jobs to them, they only wanted to see the PDF.
1. Make sure the page dimensions in your project file match those of the final trim size. e.g. For a standard business card, set the file dimensions to 3.5" x 2", not 8.5" x 11". This way, there is no confusion about what your intentions are.
2. Set bleeds to 0.125", internal margins to 0.25". These are rules of thumb, but reasonable ones. I actually had some bleeds on my last project that were as little as 0.0625", but I prefer not to cut it that close, so to speak.
3. Submit color graphics in CMYK, not RGB. If you have to use RGB, make sure the whole file is RGB. The printing presses, whether they are ink-jet, laser, or offset, use CMYK, so that's what you want to use.
3a. If there are transparencies, make sure they're on a layer below any text. (They say no transparencies or gradients in PowerPoint files, but I just wouldn't submit PowerPoint files, period.) This is less obvious than the other rules. See, when a file is prepared for printing, all layers have to be flattened. If there is transparency over text, it forces the text to be rasterized, which can make it blocky or thick, especially when compared to adjacent text that is not covered by transparency.
4. Submit images at 300 DPI or better at the intended printing size (150 DPI for large-format jobs, e.g. posters or banners). And no, you can't just scale up a 72 DPI image to 300 DPI, because that's not adding any information; that's just making small pixels bigger.
5. Don't stylize fonts in your application. i.e. Don't hit the Bold or Italic button in Word, PowerPoint, or Quark. If the font family doesn't include a native bold or italic variant, the application will fake it by thickening or slanting the letterforms. This may print okay on your home or office printer, but it may not render correctly on a professional printer.
InDesign doesn't offer you Bold or Italic buttons, but instead shows all supported variants. However, Microsoft apps won't tell you what the supported variants are, so you have to guess. More reason not to use Word for anything other than office documents. Besides, Word does a lousy job of composing paragraphs. But I digress.
This is all pretty obvious to me going into the class. (It's also general to any print job, not just to large-format.) I guess I know more than I think I know. Do I know enough to get a job in this field? I don't know that.
Then the Operations Manager got up to (finally) talk about the various media and mounting choices for large-format printing, and gave us each a swatch of paper, vinyl, banner vinyl, foamcore, sintra board, gator board, and coroplast.
Finally, we got a tour of the plant, from the 54" inkjet to the Docutech laser printers to the offset presses, with examples of typical jobs from each press.
THE REALLY COOL THING, the thing that made my whole day, was that one of the samples for the offset press was the Arisia Souvenir Book.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bridgetminerva take note: he made a point of opening to the inside front cover, and showing off the quality of the ads. W00t!
Afterwards, fabulous lunch withceo, doctordidj, and tcb.
Then back to Andor to seeelectrictruffle and his darling baby boy. Bonus social time with veek, ceelove and her darling one, and someone I (probably) had not met before.
OTOH, this had me going home at 5pm, and the traffic on 93 sucked enormous rocks. If it's like this every day, maybe I don't want to work in Cambridge.
0. Submit PDF. In this day and age, it's pretty much all you need. Their checklist says they want the source files as well, but when I actually submitted actual jobs to them, they only wanted to see the PDF.
1. Make sure the page dimensions in your project file match those of the final trim size. e.g. For a standard business card, set the file dimensions to 3.5" x 2", not 8.5" x 11". This way, there is no confusion about what your intentions are.
2. Set bleeds to 0.125", internal margins to 0.25". These are rules of thumb, but reasonable ones. I actually had some bleeds on my last project that were as little as 0.0625", but I prefer not to cut it that close, so to speak.
3. Submit color graphics in CMYK, not RGB. If you have to use RGB, make sure the whole file is RGB. The printing presses, whether they are ink-jet, laser, or offset, use CMYK, so that's what you want to use.
3a. If there are transparencies, make sure they're on a layer below any text. (They say no transparencies or gradients in PowerPoint files, but I just wouldn't submit PowerPoint files, period.) This is less obvious than the other rules. See, when a file is prepared for printing, all layers have to be flattened. If there is transparency over text, it forces the text to be rasterized, which can make it blocky or thick, especially when compared to adjacent text that is not covered by transparency.
4. Submit images at 300 DPI or better at the intended printing size (150 DPI for large-format jobs, e.g. posters or banners). And no, you can't just scale up a 72 DPI image to 300 DPI, because that's not adding any information; that's just making small pixels bigger.
5. Don't stylize fonts in your application. i.e. Don't hit the Bold or Italic button in Word, PowerPoint, or Quark. If the font family doesn't include a native bold or italic variant, the application will fake it by thickening or slanting the letterforms. This may print okay on your home or office printer, but it may not render correctly on a professional printer.
InDesign doesn't offer you Bold or Italic buttons, but instead shows all supported variants. However, Microsoft apps won't tell you what the supported variants are, so you have to guess. More reason not to use Word for anything other than office documents. Besides, Word does a lousy job of composing paragraphs. But I digress.
This is all pretty obvious to me going into the class. (It's also general to any print job, not just to large-format.) I guess I know more than I think I know. Do I know enough to get a job in this field? I don't know that.
Then the Operations Manager got up to (finally) talk about the various media and mounting choices for large-format printing, and gave us each a swatch of paper, vinyl, banner vinyl, foamcore, sintra board, gator board, and coroplast.
Finally, we got a tour of the plant, from the 54" inkjet to the Docutech laser printers to the offset presses, with examples of typical jobs from each press.
THE REALLY COOL THING, the thing that made my whole day, was that one of the samples for the offset press was the Arisia Souvenir Book.
bridgetminerva take note: he made a point of opening to the inside front cover, and showing off the quality of the ads. W00t!Afterwards, fabulous lunch with
ceo, doctordidj, and tcb.Then back to Andor to see
electrictruffle and his darling baby boy. Bonus social time with veek, ceelove and her darling one, and someone I (probably) had not met before.OTOH, this had me going home at 5pm, and the traffic on 93 sucked enormous rocks. If it's like this every day, maybe I don't want to work in Cambridge.
