Get the best film output

Want to get better output from the output center? The following will list what you can do to ensure the best output.

Skip Griswold, owner of Advanced Computer Imaging in Atlanta, saw anything from the development of TrueType to web page growth during his nine years of service at the outsourced service center. However, there have been some things that have remained the same: the fonts that the guest brought to Griswold were missing fonts, the wrong-resolution images, and the pages of the wrong order.

Most errors like this occur at the output center, using the wrong font in the page, or the image disappears, or the file cannot be printed at all. But designers and their guests still have to pay for it, though it will waste time and money.

In the digital process, designers must take on the work done by former color separation personnel. Or they must at least understand these things to prevent the creation of documents that can cause problems in the next production process. If you know what to watch closely, it will be easier to prevent disasters. In order to prevent designers from making the same mistakes and find out how to avoid mistakes, I visited seven domestic export service centers.

Inexperienced injury

Jon Pennington, production manager at Adage Graphics, and others I spoke with pointed out that the new generation of publishers who are just using image software for Windows are generally inexperienced. Not surprisingly, Pennington's problems with Windows files are much more than those with Mac problems. But designers and output centers still have to fight for these familiar issues. Griswold said, "As in other industries, novices will experience the mistakes that old employees have already experienced."

Another change that has made output center days sad is the increasing use of color inkjet printers. Prior to inkjet printers, many designers mistakenly relied on black and white laser printers to verify the final output; after the color printer was applied, the confusion became more serious. Hugo Bonilla, a prepress manager at Chantilly Printing & Graphics, said that a guest rejected his Matchprint proof because the colors did not match the prints they brought.

Because inkjet printers can disguise a lot of guilt, such as low resolution or RGB images. Furthermore, they can print color gamuts wider than four-color prints, so ink-jet colors often look more vibrant or saturated than final prints.

Similarly, web design experience has changed the expectations of many designers for their print. Like inkjet printers, computer monitors are less sensitive to differences in resolution and can display more colors than offset printing. Once a designer sees a variety of pictures on a web page, they want to apply these pictures to print. The result is the input of GIF images that guests want to reuse in their brochures, the files of web page pictures have trouble, and other output nightmares.

Font: Still the Number One Reason for Errors Of course it wouldn't surprise you. The first word of every prepress operator's comment on the designer's mistake is the font. Since e-publishing, designers have forgotten to deliver the necessary fonts. But the mistake is far more than losing the font: designers often send wrong fonts, or altered fonts, or some other font that cannot be used.

For example, some Bonilla advertisers occasionally use Macromedia Fontographer software to make font changes. Although they sent new, modified fonts, Bonilla said Adobe Type Manager Deluxe often cannot recognize it as a valid font file. Then it needs to do font substitution, sometimes it can be replaced by the approximate font corresponding to the modified font, and sometimes it can only be replaced with Courier font. Because the modified font is generally used as a title, Bonilla advised its guests to set the title in the illustration software, then turn the font into a path, and then introduce it into the typesetting software. This font becomes a vector artifact and font files are no longer needed.