QuarkXPress Passport is the multi-language version of the standard or single language QuarkXPress. It contains all the features of the standard QuarkXPress plus additional support for multi-language publishing, including multiple dictionaries and a user interface that can be set for any of the languages supported by Passport.

QuarkXPress Passport files can be saved so that the standard single language QuarkXPress can open and read it. When saving a file, QuarkXPress Passport offers you the option to save the file as either “multiple language” or “single language”. If you choose “multiple language” only QuarkXPress Passport will be able to read the file. If you choose “single language” then the standard version of QuarkXPress will be able to open and read it.

Make sure that the QuarkXPress Passport file is saved in a compatible version. For example, if you have QuarkXPress 5, the person using Passport has to save the QuarkXPress document as version 5 or earlier, or you won’t be able to open it.

But, What is this “Multiple Language” Option?
QuarkXPress Passport allows you to use different languages in one document. This means that if you have Italian, German and Spanish in the same document, you will be able to apply the correct hyphenation as it applies to those languages. So you won’t wind up hyphenating German words following Italian grammatical rules or vice versa.

You can also read this article and related ones on About Desktop Publishing.

Recently my studio changed printer, and this new firm wants us to convert all text to outlines when sending PDFs to them. While for flyers it’s fairly straight forward, when dealing with magazines, i.e. long multipage documents, using the Convert to Outlines option from InDesign can be quite daunting.

Luckily I came across a handy article about how to convert text to outlines in InDesign on InDesign Secrets. As David Blatner says:

Here’s the whole tip in a nutshell: Don’t use Convert to Outlines at all. Instead, use InDesign’s transparency flattener to convert the text automatically for you when you export a PDF.

I encourage you to read the rest of the article to see how to go about that. It’s a very nice tip that will make you save a lot of time!

Many of you probably know that if you don’t have the bold or italics version of a font installed in your system, you shouldn’t use your DTP application’s option to make it bold or italics, because that will simply result in a simulation which might work on screen or with a desktop printer, but that can cause problems once your file is sent to an external printer using a RIP.

A solution to this can be adding a border around type. Applications such as Illustrator, Corel Draw, InDesign and others allow you to do that. However there is a catch, which I discovered not long ago while working a my company’s logo (that I didn’t design).

When I was first hired by this company I was told that sometimes the logo looks thinner than it should. They had asked the designer to make it bolder when it was designed, so he added a stroke around the text since he had no bold version of the font (Andale Mono). The text in the logo is outlined by the way. Despite this the logo often just looked thinner than it should have.

One day I was making some tags for a packaging project and I used the logo. Since the tags were small, I had to shrink the logo. I made my PDF, did my preflight checks in Adobe Acrobat Professional and no matter what I did I kept getting an error about a stroke being less than 0.25 pt. For those who don’t know, printing a stroke or a line that is less wide than 0.25 pt often will not print because it’s too thin. Finally I figured out that the stroke was around the logo. In the original file, since the logo is bigger, the stroke is wider than 1pt, but once the logo is resized it becomes a hairline, thus being ignored by the printers’ RIP once it goes to press. That was why the logo was thinner sometimes. It wasn’t the designer taking “artistic license” it was just a technical problem.

Moral of the story: don’t use faux bold or italics, and when you use a stroke around text to simulate the bold version make sure you keep in mind how the design, logo, whatever you are doing may be used in the future. If the logo/graphic will be made very small, then try not to use strokes around text as it may not be printed.

I advise you read the first part of this tutorial, so you understand the reason of this ste-by-step tutorial. Wrongly set screen angles and frequency can cause your job to print incorrectly. Most designers won’t need to deal with those settings, as printers will most likely do that themselves, but extra knowledge on this won’t hurt.

You are required to have Adobe Acrobat Professional, Adobe PS or any other driver that will allow you to make PostScript or PDF files. You will not be able to use the built-in Export to PDF option in InDesign or Export Layout as… in QuarkXPress to do what is described in this tutorial. With InDesign and Illustrator you will also have to produce separated files to be able to change screen angles.

Changing Screen Angles in InDesign and Illustrator

Those two programs are definitely the most straight forward when we talk about changing screen angles. You do almost the same thing with both programs. Here you can see the screenshot of InDesign’s Print window and you can see Illustrator’s Print window here.

1. Go to File > Print. The Print window will show up. Choose PostScript File, Adobe PDF or whatever other printer allows you to either create PostScript files in the Printer option which is at the top of the window. Note that choosing Adobe PDF will not create a PDF file, it will create a PostScript file also.
2. Click on the Output tab. In the Colour option, choose In-RIP Separations (the most common separations method).
3. As you can see in this screenshot, there are 5 inks—the 4 process colours and 1 spot colour. Click on the spot colour and change screen angle and frequency. If you are not using cyan, you can just use the screen angle and frequency used by cyan, otherwise use the ones for magenta and yellow. If you are using all the colours, it is best to consult with your printer. You will usually need to make sure there is a difference of 30º amongst the screens.
4. Save to PostScript and you are done.
5. Don’t forget to Distill the file to PDF before you send it to your printer.

Note: Once you have chosen to separate your file and you have changed the screen angle of your inks, you can then choose to output your file as a composite. Once you choose Composite CMYK in the Colour option though, you will notice that you are no longer able to edit the screen angles and frequency of your inks. Yet if you choose Separations again you will see that your changes have been recorded. I suspect this means that you are able to create composite files with custom screen angles with InDesign and Illstrator, but I am not totally sure. If you have any information about this, please fill in the comment form below and let me know.

Changing Screen Angles in QuarkXPress

Unfortunately with QuarkXPress and Photoshop changing screen angles isn’t as straight forward as it is with InDesign and Illustrator, but it can be done easily. To change screen angles with QuarkXPress:

1. Go to File > Print. The Print window will show up on your screen. Click on Printer.
2. The Printer window will come up. Choose a printer that will allow you to either make PDFs or PostScript files as I mentioned at the beginning of this article (see illustration). Click on Print. If you have chosen Adobe PDF, you will be asked where to save your PDF file. Once you specified it, you will not yet create the file until you finished all the steps I am describing. So go ahead, name your file and press OK. QuarkXPress will save it wherever you told it to, once you have done all the needed steps. In the Printer window, click Print. Again, you will only be brought back to the original Print window mentioned in step 1, QuarkXPress will not yet create the file.
3. Now that you are back to the original Print window, click on the Setup tab and choose either Adobe PDF or Generic Colour as your printer description unless otherwise advised by your printer.
4. Click on the Ouput tab. To change the screen angle of an ink, first select the ink, then click on Angle and choose Other. You will be prompted to enter your custom screen angle. Do the same with the frequency.
5. Press Print and your PDF or PostScript file will be created.

Changing Screen Angles in Photoshop

Photoshop doesn’t take into consideration which printer you are using or whether you are separating your file. It just lets you change screen angles with no fuss.

1. Go to File > Print with Preview. Check Show More Options. Straight under it, you will see a drop down menu set by default to Colour Management. Click on that menu and choose Output.
2. A new set of options will appear. Click on screen. When the Halftone Screens window shows up, uncheck the Use Printer’s Default Screen option. You can now change the screen angle and frequency of your inks (see illustration).

Summary

Here is how you change screen angles in InDesign, QuarkXPress, Illustrator and Photoshop. Though most printers will do this for you, it is always good to know what screen angles and frequency are, how they can affect the print quality of your jobs and how to deal with them in case nobody else will do that for you.

Sometimes, when printing Duotone images, the printed result isn’t what you expected. Your images seem to have a strange dotted pattern which wasn’t in your digital file. This is caused by wrongly set screen angles. To understand this, it is necessary to understand what a screen is in printing.

Ink is laid on paper in form of tiny little dots that, combining each other, give you the illusion of continuos colour. You have a number of black dots, cyan dots, magenta dots and yellow dots that are printed on paper and combine to produce your orange, your brown, your red and all the other colours that can be obtained by mixing CMYK.

Creating Printing Plates

To create plates, some printers will use films, others will simply make them straight from a computer (also known as Computer To Plate process or CTP). For ease of understanding, I am going to take up the process which uses films.

Prior to separating your job into cyan, magenta, yellow and black, your printer’s service bureau will plan, or impose, your job so that it can be printed on the press. For example, if you are printing a 20 page magazine, the printer will place the pages so that they fit into the bigger sheet of the press and so that once your pages are trimmed and folded, they all fall back into sequence to give you the final product of your 20 page magazine.

Once your design is planned, the printer will send it to their imagesetter, i.e., a special kind of “printer” which creates the films, as a separated job. The printer’s imagesetter will produce a film for cyan, one for magenta, one for yellow and one for black. With positive films, there will be more dots where the darker areas are and less dots to none in the lighter areas or areas that have no colour. With negative films it’s the other way around.

Films are then placed on the plates that will be used to print your job. The plates are hit with UV light which will go through the areas of the films with less dots in more quantity. The films are effectively screening the plates, allowing the UV light to only hit certain areas of the plate. The resultant pattern of dots is therefore called screen, or halftone screen, as with this system you are able to create tints and shades of colours, instead of just creating solid colours with no shades in between—the bigger and the closer the dots on your sheet of paper, the darker your colours will be.

Screen Angles and Screen Frequency

The dots within a screen also form lines. The number of lines in one inch is called line frequency, or screen frequency, also known as LPI (Lines Per Inch). Generally the higher the LPI the finer your halftone will be, i.e., your colours will blend better with each other. However you need to keep in mind the resolution of the printer that will output the job when setting LPI.

Each screen must have different angles and line frequency to prevent dots from overlapping. If dots overlap too much, colours don’t mix well and you get the so called moire effect.

When printing CMYK images, you shouldn’t have a problem with the moire effect. Usually the defaults in your layout application will work fine. It’s when you start using spot colours, which it is usually the case in duotone images, that you might get trouble. Look at the screenshot on the left. I took InDesign’s Print window as an example in this case. The “New Swatch Colour” ink has the same angle and frequency of the black plate. That will very likely create the unwanted moire effect. Unless you printer’s service bureau handles this for you (and most of them do), you will have to change the screen screen angle and frequency manually.

In the next article I will explain how to change screen angle and freequency in InDesign, QuarkXPress, Photoshop and Illustrator.

Adobe released Creative Suite 3 today, which is probably their biggest release ever. Since the merge with Macromedia a lot of speculation has gone on about which programs were to make it into the Suite and which ones were to be ditched. For the web designers who were wondering, GoLive has been replaced by Dreamweaver, for starters. You will find Acrobat 8 in CS 3 Design Standard Edition (finally!) and Flash in the Premium Edition. Yet talking about CS 3 as 1 suite is a mistake. There are 6 different suites, which address the needs of print designers, web designers and video editors.

Sue Chastain of About Graphics Software presents us a comprehensive and very hard to beat overview of the Suite, so I am not going to repeat what she has one, and, without any more delay, I encourage you to see the overview for yourself.

An image that is 500 x 600 pixels is probably bigger in inches that an image that is 400 x 300 pixels, you say. Well, in actual fact that might be not true when you print your image. The image size also depends on the resolution of the image. Sometimes a bigger image is smaller than a smaller image. Now that I have confused you enough, let’s have a look at this carefully.

Take this example: you have an image that is 300 x 400 pixels. When you view that image on screen it will always look like an image that is 300 x 400 pixels indipendently from the resolution. And you say: “D’oh! OBVIOUSLY it will.” Have a look at what that means though: if you view an image on screen that is 300 x 400 pixels with a resolution of 72 ppi (pixels per inch) it will look the same on screen as an image that is 300 x 400 pixels with a resolution of 300 ppi.

The size in inches has to do with the printed size of your image. An image that is 300 x 400 pixels with a resolution of 72 ppi will print bigger (5.5 inches x 4.1 inches) than an image that is 300 x 400 ppi with a resolution of 300 ppi (1.3 inches by 1 inch). However the image at 72 ppi will look worse than the image at 300 ppi (this is taking in consideration the fact that you are resizing and NOT resampling your image).

To know how big your image will be in inches take the dimensions of your image and divide them by the resoultion. So with an image that is 400 x 300 pixels with a resolution of 72 ppi do the following:

400 / 72 = 5.5 inches
300 / 72 = 4.1 inches
So your final size is 5.5 x 4.1 inches.

It is very important to make sure all files sent to printers are press worthy. That means they won’t cause any problems once they hit the press, whether it be font problems, colours and so forth. While there are specific things that can be handled with a preflight checklist—Jacci Howard Bear has a very good one on her site—there are other things you need to account for. I am going to quickly roll them out in this article, and I will take each one up individually in articles to come.

Keep in mind the end result while designing.
Don’t bother using a zillion transparencies if they won’t print. Learn what you can and can’t do with transparency and what will print. For example placing a black box onto some text and setting it to Extrusion will most likely not print correctly.

Spell check and proofread.
Check dates. Check phone numbers and spell check. Print the document and read it yourself, have others read it, whatever. Just proofread it. Spell check again. Then proofread. Find a mistake, then proofread it. Oh, did I mention to proofread it?

Don’t forget the bleed when using photos.
Remember that if you place some photos so that they bleed outside the page, you will need to give them an allowance of 3 mm, or whatever your printer asks for. You will be surprised by how a photo composition changes just by cutting off 3 mm. You might wind up cutting someone’s hand or ear. Should anything like that happen, make sure it doesn’t look awkward.

Don’t use faux bold or faux italics.
Some software fakes the bold and italics versions of a font. If you don’t check whether those versions are actually installed on your computer, you might think you have them and eventually they won’t print the right way once your design hits the press, even if they did print on your desktop printer. Skewed text usually isn’t a problem. If you really have to use faux bold or italics, outline your text. This resolves the problem most of the time, however it isn’t 100% safe. Further your text might look bad, because you didn’t use the specifically designed bold or italic version of the font. Fonts are designed by designers, the same way you design your posters.

Once the file is complete run a preflight.
There is software that allows you to do that. Adobe Acrobat (full version, not the Reader) has an excellent tool for this. You can also do it manually, following the checklist I mentioned at the beginning.

If your software allows you to do it, check separations.
Software such as InDesign and Adobe Acrobat allows you to view your file as it will appear once colour separated, simulating very much how it will look like on the press’ plates. This procedure will help you understand whether everything knocks out or overprints as you want to. Pay particular attention to tints of black (i.e. anything that is not 100% black). They most likely will NOT knock out and might blend with your background, making the gray pick up the background colour. If need be, you will need to manually set those gray items to knock out.

Print your document at the highest quality you can.
You might have printed the document a few times before, but probably just low quality to proofread it or check other things. By the way, I think I didn’t mention it before: don’t forget to proofread your document. Proofreading aside, printing the document at the highest quality your printer is capable of will allow you to see other quirks that maybe your monitor didn’t show you. Some colour correction that didn’t work right. Or something you did with Photoshop that didn’t show on screen, but once printed it came right out of the page to give you a black eye. How many times has that happened when you used the Stamp tool? Come on, I won’t tell anyone.

This is a quick list of things to watch for. Like I said, I will go into more details in articles to come.

While this is not a complete guide to PDFs, here you will find the major types of PDFs and their purposes

Like for any other graphics, a person using a PDF has to make sure he is using the right one for the job. Saying that a
PDF “is good for printing” is like saying that “EPS files contain vector graphics”. Both statements are inaccurate and to a certain degree even untrue. PDF files serve many purposes—you cannot use a PDF which was intended for onscreen viewing also for offset printing, unless you want poor results. PDFs that were originally intended for offset printing, cannot be used for online viewing due to their size, the same way you wouldn’t use TIFF or EPS files for web design.

As this is about Desktop Publishing, I won’t delve into the settings to be used for PDFs intended for screen viewing. The focus of this article is on those types of PDFs which can and should be used for printing.

Many versions of the same file

As Adobe’s PDF technology advances, new and improved PDF versions make their appearance. Here is a list of the most recent PDF versions, what they support and what versions of Acrobat can be used to read or deal with them.

PDF 1.3
Supported by Acrobat 4 or later. It supports CMYK and spot colours, notes. Some security features are also supported. It does not support transparency. This PDF version is the most widely supported by printing firms.

PDF 1.4
Supported by Acrobat 5 or later. It supports all of the features of PDF 1.3, but it also supports transparency. The security features have been improved, compared to its predecessor. Support for JavaScript is also improved. When transparencies are present, some problems might arise when a PDF 1.4 is given to a printing firm. It depends on the printer’s RIP. Ask your printer if their RIP supports transparency and what PDF version they can handle.

PDF 1.5
Supported by Acrobat 6 or later. Compression techniques are improved. Media files such as movies and layers can be supported with this version.

PDF 1.6
Supported by Acrobat 7. 3D artwork can now be embedded. Amongst other things, it also has enhanced annotation and watermark features.

For those who want to know more about the development of this versatile file format, here is a very insteresting article by L. Leurs, entitled History of PDF.

PDF/X

PDF/X is a PDF’s subset. It is still a PDF, but the person making the PDF has to follow certain criteria in choosing the settings to produce the PDF/X. The purpose of the PDF/X is to resolve some of the most common problems that printing firms encounter when using PDFs provided by designers, such as RGB images, missing images and fonts and others. The PDF/X is therefore intended for printing purposes and not for online purposes. Also the PDF/X is not the best solution when you want to print documents from your desktop printer, as usually that type of printer gives better results with RGB images, while PDF/X has to be strictly CMYK (with allowance for spot colours, which anyway cannot be rendered correctly on an RGB desktop printer).

Because of its restrictions, PDF/X sacrifices flexibility for functionality. While you will hardly have any problems when printing a PDF/X, there are things you are not allowed to do and therefore your design might suffer.

There are several standards of PDF/X and the most used are PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3.

PDF/X-1a

Making a PDF/X-1a isn’t actually that difficult. InDesign CS allows you to make one simply using its built-in Export PDF option. However for those who do not use that program, who want to make a preflight check before they make the PDF, or need to troubleshoot a PDF to make it PDF/X-1a compliant, it is important to know the requirements of the PDF/X-1a standard.These are the requirements for the PDF/X-1a:

PDF/X-3

PDF/X-3 allows you to do a few more things, but essentially the list of settings above applies to PDF/X-3 as well. The differences are:

• RGB is allowed, but only with a profile.
• LAB mode is allowed.
• Colour management for CMYK is allowed. While with the PDF/X-1a standard you have to specify a printing profile, with PDF/X-3 you don’t have to. You can simply say that the PDF will be CMYK and you can then use your own profile.

Having a degree can be important in the design business, especially for people who look for firms to employ them. Let’s not forget what having a degree means, that is having the knowledge to use whatever communication channel to effectively deliver a message, whether it be through a flyer, a poster, a website or anything else you can think of.

Fear not, however, because BoDo (Business of Design Online) has just launched. This is one of the most brilliant ideas I have seen. I’ll let the people behind BoDo tell you what this new blog is about.

Many designers setting up shop have searched for answers and assistance by posting questions on various design forums, emailing pros for advice, reading everything on offer and googling when it’s not.

Forums, books and blog postings are helping to address this issue, but from our vantage point, concentrated help was needed. Help that would bring it all together, in one place. Easy to find.

As a Creative Latitude response, the Business of Design online (BoDo) was created.

Conceived and developed by Catherine (cat) Wentworth, Neil (nt) Tortorella and Jeanette (jay) Wickham (the BoDo team), BoDo’s aim is to provide a focused wealth of information, tools and techniques for successfully managing and marketing a design practice.

That’s right, there won’t be a Photoshop tutorial in sight.

On BoDo you’ll find continuously updated resources for running a design shop, including select e-books, business forms, excellent articles and more.

Although the team will contribute regular blog posts and the occasional series, we feel a big part of our strength will be the growing list of visiting authors.

On the design side, BoDo’s visiting author line-up includes Creative Latitude’s Graphic Make-overs host Alina Hagen of Alina Design. At Alina’s In-sights, Alina will post about life in-house. At Erin’s Review, studious Erin Harris of Sanguine Theory will share thoughts on various business of design books. As they happen, at Bean’s Biz, Stefan Bean of Pulse Creative Partners, Inc., will mull over the experiences of a new(ish) business start-up. Sometimes weekly, always monthly, Thomas (Tom) Stephan will have us grinning away in the work place at Dyer Straits.

As designers do not run their businesses in a vacuum, rounding out the discussion will be non-design authors such as writer and blogger ME “Liz” Strauss of Successful Blog, Letting Liz Be, Liz Strauss.com, The Blog Herald, and Performancing.com. Liz will talk about all things business writing at Write with ME. At Creative Conversations, Dr. Tammy Lenski of I Can’t Say That! and Lenski Strategic will share wisdom about conversations and conflict on the client and colleague front. At Creative Coaching, trained psychotherapist and creative coach Mark McGuinness from Wishful Thinking will instruct on the subject of creative thinking, communication and collaboration.

To get things started, we’ll begin with a bite, a nibble, a BoDo Niblet if you will, the “Starting Out and Setting Up” series. The two week series, pulling in advice from Abhijit Nadgouda, Alina Hagen, Chris Tomlinson, Danita Reynolds, Tammy Lenski Leslie Burns-Dell’Acqua, ME “Liz” Strauss, Mark McGuinness, Stefan Bean and of course Cat, Neil and Jay, will tackle knowing when you’re ready, managing money, equipment, location, etc.

Coming after will be two series running side by side – “Top 10 Marketing Missteps” (by Neil), covering marketing faux pas. And “Designer’s Working With” (by Cat). The “Working With” series talks about how to effectively work with other creatives such as writers, photographers, marketing professionals, illustrators, programmers, printers and pre press specialists.

In between will be Podcast Humpdays (wink, wink for all you Australians and Europeans out there), Resourceful Fridays, Weekly Recaps, Sunday Stressbusters, and a poll. Jay will come in with, what else, Ask jay, to answer individual business questions.

Starting out with a full schedule, the team looks forward to your comments and input on BoDo. It’s a win-win offer actually, as it’s our goal to help others wade through the new design business quagmire.

So come on down,
The BoDo Team
cat – nt – jay