Mar 21 2009
Look in the Swatches panels of InDesign and Illustrator, and the Colors list in QuarkXPress, and you’ll see a mystery color named “Registration.” It’s intended for page information, registration marks, and trim marks. When we used to output film and strip it up on light tables, we used registration marks to ensure that all the inks printed in alignment. Registration is intended for use only by the application, not the user, except in rare cases.
Mar 10 2009
I was raised on Macs (well, actually, I was raised on X-Acto knives, but let’s fast-forward a bit). But I learned Windows in self-defense many years ago. At first, it was a bit foreign (we’re talking Windows 3), but not painful. After all, it’s not as if Microsoft hasn’t, ah, emulated the Mac interface.
Why did I do this? So that I could handle customers’ PC files when they came into the printing plant. We had quickly learned that it wasn’t smart to try to move the files to the Mac: fonts didn’t translate, text reflowed, and things generally fell apart. It made more sense to keep the jobs in their native habitat.
Dec 05 2008
I’ve just received word that my book, “Real World Print Production” (Peachpit Press, 2006) is going to be revised. I’m pleased that Peachpit is going to let me update the book for current versions of software, and it will also give me the opportunity to expand some of the other content to reflect changes and growth in print and imaging technologies.
It all sounds like such fun now; check back when I’ve been up for 18 hours pounding the keyboard or staring at a stubborn paragraph 
No ETA yet; I haven’t started pounding the keyboard. But I’m hoping to have it done by early Spring.
Dec 05 2008
If you’re a print service provider who’s starting to receive CS4 files for output, you might appreciate the latest revision of the venerable Printing Guide. It’s now available here.
The PDF is fully bookmarked; open the Bookmarks panel (View>Navigation Panels>Bookmarks) to reveal the extensive list of hyperlinked topics. Additionally, the Table of Contents is hyperlinked to internal content, so it’s easy to find your way around.
Designers will find lots of useful content, too. You can select a low-res or high-res version of the 139-page guide, and you’ll also find the CS3 version of the printing guide on the same page. Both offer insights into print-specific features in the Suite applications, and provide cautions and workarounds for each application.
I’m proud to say that I’m responsible for both the CS3 and CS4 revisions, starting with the CS2 version and building on its content. Consequently, some of the content is legacy, some was contributed by other revisers during the early CS3 phase, but the final versions of both are my doing. It was a labor of love, and I’m proud of the finished pieces. I hope you find the guides a valuable resource.
Given recent upheaval at Adobe (600 layoffs yesterday, including some very dear friends), I don’t know if there will be more versions of this resource. If Adobe doesn’t spearhead an update for future CS versions (assuming there will be future CS versions, and I can’t imagine there won’t be), I’ll do it myself.
Sep 25 2008
In one of the InDesign forums, a subscriber asked how he could “fatten up” his artwork in InDesign, because the InDesign file was going to be used as artwork for embossing. To ensure that nothing would be undercut or too delicate in the embossing plate, he was asked by his printer to spread all artwork — text, an Illustrator logo, and a bitmap signature. He needed to perform a trapping operation called “spreading.” Here’s my answer to him:
While InDesign can’t create trapped content, there is a way to create a trapped PDF from InDesign. For the job described, which requires “fattening up” all artwork, you must convince InDesign that it needs to spread the artwork. It looks long-winded when you see all the steps below, but it’s not really that bad. For this to happen, you need three things:
-artwork that’s lighter than the background (I’ll use C100 in this example). And your signature must be a bitmap TIFF. (OK, so maybe you actually need four things.)
-a custom trap preset in InDesign
-Distiller (if you don’t have Distiller, you can’t do this)
Aug 27 2008
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.
Aug 18 2008
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 »