Print format - help please

BaZ87

BaZ87

BaZ87

Don
Joined
9 Jun 2004
Posts
47,288
My dad's in the process of printing a few posters for his restaurant and asked me to knock up a few designs for him to send off to the printer. With my incredible limited ability I made them using Publisher and sent them off to the printer but they've got back to me requesting that the files are in the following format which means nothing to me:

1. All objects within the PDF to be CMYK colour space.

2. Acrobat 1.3 compatible

3. 3mm bleed with crop marks on all files

4. All fonts embedded

I've figured out how to turn the publisher file into a PDF but I haven't got a clue where to start with the rest. Any help would be much appreciated.
 
1. CMYK is a print colour space, which is used in order to ensure that you get accurate reproduction of the colour you see on your monitor when printing out. So essentially your document and items within need to have a CMYK colour space baked in. Many labs and print shops can also provide you with a colour space to match their printing systems.

2. Acrobat is Adobe's PDF creator and reader software.

3. The bleed is basically where the image extends beyond the borders of what you actually want from the finished product. Crop marks would show wear it ends and to cut. You would be able to do all this in a proper piece of software such as Adobe Illustrator, I'm not sure whether Publisher is up for the task. I'm not sure on that though.

4. If you didn't do this and had use some kind of fancy font you downloaded which is non standard, they won't have it on their system and so the font would be replaced with something generic.


This may all be a bit over your head, so that is why people would usually just go to a print shop who have print facilities and can do the design for you as well.
 
These links should help
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/p...omposite-of-your-publication-HP001003578.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/p...a-bleed-for-your-publication-HP010120809.aspx

The first covers the CMYK colour space and also the font embedding (the option to embed them should be in the Graphics and Fonts tab)
The second covers the bleed and crop marks.

These next links also provide a good explanation of what the CMYK colour space, crop marks, bleeds etc mean and, more importantly, how to set Publisher up to use them.

http://www.theonlineprinter.com.au/info/RGBtoCMYK.aspx
http://www.theonlineprinter.com.au/info/Bleeds.aspx
And their tips for using Publisher:
http://www.theonlineprinter.com.au/info/PublisherTips.aspx

The tip about dragging graphical elements off the page slightly to create your bleeds is a useful one, particularly if you don't have an image setter driver on your PC. These usually have additional print sizes like A4.extra, A5.extra, Letter.extra - the extra just means that the paper that's printed on is slightly bigger than the required size. Your crop marks will show where this extra paper should be trimmed off by the printer so the posters arrive at you in their proper size. By extending your graphics outside the page, you create the same effect. Don't forget to do the same if you have a page background that isn't white. For example, if your posters are white text on a blue background, create a blue rectangle graphic and make it slightly bigger than the intended page size. Then place your text and other images over the top of this.

As I recall, creating a PDF from Publisher requires the creation of a Postcript file and then either Acrobat or a PDF conversion plug-in to create the PDF. I'd suggest that you install PDFCreator http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator which sits as a virtual printer on your PC.

Apart from being able to print or create PDF files from any program (just use the PDFCreator "printer" in your software's printing dialog to do this), it can also handle the embedding of fonts and conversion between different colour spaces. You can also save these options with different profiles, e.g. one for your posters with embedded fonts and CMYK colour, another profile without embedding and RGB for normal printing, and a profile with embedded fonts and RGB for a PDF intended for viewing online. All you need to worry about in Publisher is to allow for the bleeds, and to include the printer marks for cropping, and let PDFCreator do the rest.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom