Claudia McCue

Remember when printing companies used to give out free tint sample books, showing combinations of cyan, magenta, and yellow so you could get an idea of what your CMYK combos might look? I haven’t seen one in a while, so I have created files so you can print your own. Of course, unless your printing device is carefully profiled, your output won’t necessarily match a commercial printer’s results. But if you print in-house, you may find them helpful. They show only combinations of C+M+Y —adding all the black combinations would result in over 400 pages, so I’m afraid you’ll have to imagine what adding 15%K might produce.

I’ve provided two versions:

Illustrator CS5 file: www.practicalia.net/tintblocks/ColorBlocksBy5.ai
Adobe PDF file: www.practicalia.net/tintblocks/ColorBlocksBy5.pdf

Hope you find them useful!

…and I shouldn’t HAVE to.

I’ve been sort of mentoring a woman who’s transitioning from marketing to doing freelance design work. Even though she didn’t train as a designer, she has very good instincts for what looks good, and she’s done a very good job of teaching herself InDesign; I just sort of fill in the blanks, and help her anticipate printing issues.

Currently, she’s designing a pocket folder with an 8-page stitched-in insert for a client whose budget dictates that the short-run job be printed at a nationally franchised quick-print place which shall remain nameless unless they keep being stupid. Then I will name them.

The digital printing revolution has made color printing available to individuals and small businesses who couldn’t afford long-run offset work. But the downside is that these places may be staffed by people who either don’t have any commercial printing background, or see the endeavor as a variation of “d’you want fries with that?”

She’s been asked to provide the 8-page 9″x12″ insert as four 18″x12″ single-page printer spreads. I made her call them and ask, “Do you have imposition software?”

“Uh, well, yeah…”

“So can’t I design in two-page reader spreads as Nature intended, and you can impose to the correct final pagination?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.”

What— is it that hard to crank up Preps or Quite Imposing, call up a standard 8-page saddle-stitch form, import the PostScript or PDF file, click OK, and eat a Twinkie? Shoot, you could just export PDFs, do homegrown imposition in InDesign and hit File>Print, for that matter.

The moral of this story? Don’t let counter jockeys buffalo you. And find a genuinely well-equipped digital printing place, such as Imagers in Atlanta. They’re professionals with the necessary background, plus a nice helping of Good Sense(TM), something apparently lacking in the place my friend is forced to deal with. And they do high-quality work at a reasonable price.

There. I feel better.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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)

1. Turn your Illustrator artwork to 100 cyan, then update it in InDesign. Yes, I know it will emboss — not print in cyan — but it doesn’t matter what color it appears to be: they’ll output that plate and use it as the basis for an embossing die.
2. In InDesign, color your scanned signature 100 cyan: You can just drag the 100 cyan swatch on top of the signature frame without selecting the frame first. Alternatively, select the sig artwork with the white arrow, and choose the cyan swatch.
3. Change all your text to 100% cyan.
4. Create a big 100% black object behind everything. This creates a situation InDesign is willing to trap.

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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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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 »