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.

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.

BioRUST is a design community featuring tutorials and resources for Adobe Illustrator, Flash, Photoshop, Blender 3D Maxon Cinema 4D and web technologies such as MySQL, php and others.

There are several interesting tutorials, such as the fire effects Photoshop tutorial Enhancing Iris Color tutorial. There is one that has caught my attention in particular, due to my passion for manga and anime. It’s the Basic Anime Hair tutorial. This is a fun tutorial for those who like me love Japanese comics and it is also simple to do. Have fun and, if you like, feel free to submit your creations and they will be showcased here, together with your contact details if you wish.

[tags]manga, anime, comics, photoshop, tutorial[/tags]

With a normal shape, changing colours in the Colours palette does the trick, however when you try to do that with a symbol it doesn’t work. Using the Appearance palette doesn’t make any difference. What do you do now?

Select your symbol. Go to the Symbols Palette and click on the little arrow on the top right. A menu will appear. Click on Break Link Symbol.

Et Voilat. Now you can edit it.

[tags]illustrator[/tags]

While there will be InDesign tutorials on ThinkCreation soon, you can already have a look at those I have written on other sites. Following is the list of tutorials as of February 2006 and where to find them.

InDesign Work Area
Familiarize yourself with InDesign CS’ workspace, its palettes and menus. Published also on About Desktop Publishing.

Unexpected White Outlines Around Graphics in InDesign
Graphics look fine in InDesign, but they don’t when you make a PDF. This is often a problem with transparencies. Published also on About Desktop Publishing

Threaded Text in InDesign CS
Find out how to flow text into two or more text frames.

How to Set Up a Document in InDesign CS (multipart tutorial)
This lesson will introduce InDesign’s document area… where the later design magic takes place. Also on About Desktop Publishing.

InDesign CS’ Advanced Typographical Controls
Find out about the Paragraph Composer and Single Line Composer, control hyphenation and more.

Working With Colour in InDesign CS (multipart tutorial)
Here’s how to use the Colour palette, Swatches palette and also brief explanation the Gradients palette. Published also on About Desktop Publishing.

Importing Spot Colours
Working with spot colours and the Swatches Palette.

InDesign CS’ Tools Palette (multipart tutorial)
A fairly in-depth view of the tools palette. Published also on About Desktop Publishing.

The Paragraph Palette
You will find that as an InDesign user the Paragraph palette is one of the most needed tools.

Design with Character—InDesign Character Style Sheets
Character Style Sheets can be real time savers for designers especially in the creation of long or multi-page documents. Also published on About Desktop Publishing.

Add Style and Save Time with Paragraph Style Sheets
Paragraph styles allow designers to achieve and keep consistency throughout documents.

InDesign CS and CS2 How-to: Typographer Quotes, Bulleted Lists & Dot Leaders
This tutorial will cover three amongst the most common typographical tasks as they are handled with InDesign CS & CS2.

[tags]Adobe, Creative Suite, InDesign, software, typography, tutorial, how-to, layout, design, graphic design, desktop publishing, document [/tags]

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