Claudia McCue

As with so many valid emotions, it has warranted a country song, and I’ll paraphrase: If loving my monitor is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

I’ve had a LaCie Electron 22 Blue IV for a little over 3 years, and I’ve been more than pleased with the color and reliability of the CRT. The fact that it weighs as much as a 3rd-grader was outweighed [ha] by the reliable color.

I still do a quite a bit of color work, but I’d grown weary of doing my writing on a laptop. Oh, I’ll still have to write on the road, but my back has been begging me to switch to the desktop when I can. I began to realize that either the CRT was going a bit soft, or that I’d been spoiled by the crispness of the laptop screen. Because I usually wrote on the laptop, but retouched on the desktop, I hadn’t been conscious of the softness of text onscreen on the CRT (at least, as compared to the LCD laptop screen). But once it was pointed out to me by a squinting friend, I couldn’t ignore it.

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I got a call from a printer friend of mine yesterday, asking me to help him unravel a color mystery. A job stopped just before the press started rolling when the pressman saw bright green on the approved proof, but blue ink earmarked for the job. Yikes! How could something be that far off?!

It took a bit of digging to get to the root of the problem: The missteps took place at several points in the job’s life.

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It may be easier to prevent problems in InDesign when you build a file from scratch. But when you inherit an existing file, it pays to be paranoid. Does the file look perfect? Maybe it is, but assume it isn’t. Markzware’s FlightCheck catches a lot of things, but InDesign offers some helpful forensic tools that can aid you while you’re in the working files, and, in fact, may make it easier to find some things than using FlightCheck. And your own eyes, coupled with your knowledge of standard operations in your workgroup can be the best tools of all. Continue Reading »

Does your printer ask you to submit PDFs as job files, or do they ask you to send application files (page layout, plus all the necessary fonts and artwork)? Maybe we’re just slow here on the East Coast (or, more likely, justifiably paranoid), but all the printers I know ask for application files. Or, if they encourage clients to submit PDFs, they ask for the application files as a backup. (If you’ve ever tried to edit text in a PDF, you know why.)

Given the difficulty of editing PDFs (even with the big guns of PitStop), I think this is understandable. It goes beyond fixing a comma: sometimes extensive changes are necessary to make a job print predictably. For example: a solid black back cover on a brochure, if built and printed as 100K on an offset press, will be anemic and blotchy (toner-based digital presses have a more robust black). Consequently, a large solid black area is usually converted to a rich black for stronger coverage. Unless you anticipate this when building your page layout, the printer needs to be able to modify the content so the job prints to your satisfaction. Not much fun to attempt fixing this in a PDF. Continue Reading »

While the Ink Manager in Acrobat doesn’t really change content (unless you use the Ink Manager available through the Convert Colors function, as I mentioned in an earlier post), InDesign’s Ink Manager has always been “for real.” But at first blush, it may seem that it’s just kidding. (I’ll explain in a minute.)

InDesign’s Ink Manager is available from the panel menus of the Separations Preview and Swatches panels, as well as in print and export dialogs. They’re just different doors to the same porch, so don’t worry that Ink Manager behaves differently depending on how you invoked it (as it does in Acrobat 9). However you got there, Ink Manager lets you remap one spot color to another, or to a process plate. It’s also one-stop shopping for changing spot colors to process. (It won’t let you map a process plate to a spot color, however.) Continue Reading »