Tag Archives: prepress

Converting Text to Outlines in InDesign

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 ...

Changing Screen Angles in Duotone Images, Part 2

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 Duotone Images, Part 1

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.

How Big Is Big in Pixels?

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.

Checking Files for Printing

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.

PDF: History, Features & Co.

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.

What Is a Slug?

In 2004 I posted this question in the About Desktop Publishing forums. I did get a reply, which was perfect in regards to its context. However today someone replied to that question again adding another definition. While I definitely know what a slug is since quite a while I thought I’d share this short forum ...