Whitbread D. The Design Manual (анг.яз.)

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Prepress

Prepress describes the preparation process between design

and printing. It is a point in the schedule where you collect

all the materials that will enable accurate translation of the

design into a printed document.

For example, when you are preparing your document,

place low-resolution images into the document to be able to

move around it faster without waiting for each large image

ﬁle to download. At prepress, these are replaced with their

equivalent high-resolution scans that will ensure their

printed quality. So you must identify and supply both the

low- and high-resolution images to your imagesetter.

Because of typefaces being supplied by many companies

and each company’s font description being slightly differ-

ent, you will need to list and possibly supply your

imagesetter with all the fonts needed in your document.

Some programs will create a list of everything that an

imagesetter requires to reproduce your document, but it

helps if you understand the process.

For example, when you go through the proofs noting

down the font usage, you need to list not only the face but

also each weight of the face you use. Also, you may

sometimes forget to list the expert font sets, dingbats,

symbol and picture fonts you used. They are easy to

overlook, but you will not recognise your document if they

are not supplied.

In Web site and multimedia development, the equivalent

process to prepress falls between completion of design and

uploading and is called ﬂight checking and can include alpha

and beta testing phases.

Finished artwork preparation

Preparation of a ﬁle in readiness for prepress is called

ﬁnished artwork. It includes the detailed collection and

checking of everything: text, typefaces, scans, layers,

backgrounds, page numbers, ﬁles.

251

CHECKLIST

What you need to supply to

your imagesetter

In addition to your disks, proofs or

printouts, and labelled transparencies

(if scanning is required), you must

supply a printout or sheet listing the

following:

q Contact details:

– your name

– your organisation

– your direct phone number

– your fax

– your e-mail address

– your billing address and

details

– your street address for

deliveries

q Materials supplied:

– disks and the files contained

on each that pertain to the

job

– transparencies and their

label or code

– scans and their format and

file name

q Format used: Mac or PC

q Program/s used:

– version number/s

q Fonts used:

– exact name of typeface as

listed in font menu and

weights including bold and

italic

– any dingbat, picture or

symbol fonts

q Final production requirements,

requesting as appropriate: digital

files, separated film positives,

film negatives, proofs

q Name of the printer or

reproducer who will use the

imagesetter’s files or film

– name of contact and direct

phone number, for queries

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When you are supplying scans, check that the resolution

is appropriate for their ﬁnal reproduction, otherwise you

may see jaggies in your ﬁnal job. This often occurs where

you made a last-minute decision to increase the size of an

image to improve your layout, but forgot to rescan it at a

correspondingly higher resolution for its new sizing.

Have your scans been saved as CMYK for printing,

instead of RGB? Have you converted all Pantone colours

into CMYK mixes for your CMYK ﬁle? Have you checked

you don’t have any rogue or unexpected Pantones in your

Pantone ﬁle?

Have you limited the range in your black-and-white

scans appropriately for reproduction? Often this requires

setting the highlights at 5% and the shadows to 90% or

maybe 95%.

Have your scans compensated for dot gain as advised by

your printer? On some uncoated stocks, this might require

reducing the 50% mid-tone dot to 45% and a 90–95%

shadow dot to 85%.

If printing on a cream stock, you might also uniformly

reduce the amount of yellow in order to compensate for the

yellow content of the stock to maintain a more realistic

colour. On other coloured stocks, consult your printer or

paper company for advice on colour correction.

Check alignments and make any adjustments to kerning

and other optical corrections. Also check that each text

block contains the text it is supposed to and links to the

correct page.

Bleed

Any image, rule, graphic, logo, background or colour—or

even type—that continues off the edge of a page is said to

‘bleed’ and, in order for it to print correctly, it must extend

beyond the page area by at least 3 mm on each side. This

is then trimmed back to the page edge during the ﬁnishing

processes of guillotining or die cutting.

Check that all scans have been correctly positioned for

the trim. Their picture boxes now include an extra 3 mm of

image. For example, you should not recentre a portrait—it

should be centred on the trimmed width, not the bleed

width that you see on screen.

Because bleed is so dependent on accurate trimming for

its effect, it is wise not to have too ﬁne a detail on the edge

of your sheet—even just a coloured stripe parallel to the

252 Production

An image that bleeds■

off a page needs to print over the

page area by at least 3 mm and be

trimmed back to its final size.

DWD-DM07 4/5/01 4:03 PM Page 252

edge can be dangerous if it is, say, 3 mm or thinner. Note

that, with bleed, a 3 mm stripe would be drawn at 6 mm

thick and placed over the trim edge.

Trim marks, fold marks and registration marks

Most page layout programs will automatically apply trim

marks and registration marks to your ﬁle. They are required

to help the printer when the job is on the press.

Trim marks need to align through the page if the pages

are backed up. They will guide the guillotine operator who

will trim the ﬁnal job. They usually start 3 mm from the

trimmed edge and are about 5–7 mm in length.

There will not automatically be fold marks on your job.

These are similar to trim marks. They start 3 mm from the

edge of the page and are ﬁne dashed lines (rather than the

ﬁne solid line of trim marks).

Registration marks are needed whenever there are two or

more colours in a print job. They are small cross hatches

that are in exactly the same position on the artwork for each

colour. They need to overprint exactly on press. They ensure

the colours are printed in their exact placement or ‘in

one to the right, partly to be out of the way of spine fold

marks, but also for alignment purposes in imposition. It

can quickly be seen if a page is the wrong way up.

Trapping

Trapping is a technique where you prepare each colour in a

separated set to take account of small discrepancies in

in printing. Spreading—or ﬂooding—and choking adjacent

colours achieve this.

With trapping, there will be a slight printed overlap—

often as small as 0.25 point. Brieﬂy, the principle is that the

darkest colour can print tightly (‘choked’) and the lightest

colour can bleed into it by being ‘ﬂooded’ or ‘spread’.

READ MORE ABOUT IT

Agfa produces a range of excellent publications including these titles:

An introduction to digital color prepress, A guide to color separation,

An introduction to computer-to-plate printing, Color bytes: Blending the art

and science of color, The secrets of color management

Prepress 253

Misregistration■

where one colour accidentally

overlaps another, leaving a fine white

gap, could be compensated for by

spreading the lighter colour and

choking the darker one.

registration

trim

trimfold

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File management

Ensure you name ﬁles in a way that clearly identiﬁes

yourself, the job, the ﬁle and type of ﬁle.

For example, the ﬁles for this book were named in a

series that started with ‘DM01-DWD.doc’, where ‘DM’

abbreviates the title; ‘01’ indicates the ﬁrst ﬁle; ‘DWD’

identiﬁes David Whitbread Design; and ‘.doc’ distinguishes

the document from, say, the ﬁrst text ﬁle.

At the end of the code most people put a full stop and an

abbreviated ﬁle description: .txt for text ﬁles; .pict, .tiff, .gif,

.pdf, .eps for image ﬁles as appropriate; and .doc for the

complete document.

Always keep a back-up of your ﬁles and never give your

only copy to another supplier. It is recommended that it be

stored off-site (in case of ﬁre, ﬂood or theft).

Labelling the disk for quick retrieval is important also.

You might create folders for each job to keep all picture, text

and document ﬁles together. You might create a disk for

each client. You might simply back-up by date.

Imposition

Printers prepare the imposition for books. Because of

folding, some pages will be upside down when printed on

the ﬂat sheet and pages that will be seen together in the

booklet may be far away from each other in the ﬂat plan.

In an A6 booklet, page 8 will be to the left of page 1,

page 2 to the left of page 7, etc. Notice that even-numbered

pages are on the left and odd numbered pages on the right.

Also note that the numbers will equal one more than the

total number of pages: in this case, 8 + 1 = 9; 2 + 7 = 9.

For magazines and books that have coloured sections

and different colour distribution throughout the book, a ﬂat

plan helps to identify where the colour falls in the imposi-

tion. The designer can then design accordingly.

Long-8s

A variation on a standard imposition is the long-8, so called

because it doubles over itself to the side, with no upside-

down pages. This means that alignment of pictures on a

double-page spread is easier to achieve even if they are

some distance apart in the imposition, because the

alignment is no longer as dependent on the folding process.

254 Production

Front

581

Back

763

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Foldouts

A page that folds out to accommodate a map, table,

photograph or illustration needs production planning to be

successful and cost-effective. The page should fold shorter

than the full width, so that when the book is guillotined, the

fold is not cut off; and the ﬂap will also be anything from

1–5 mm shorter again, so it sits snugly into the spine. In the

case of ring binders, it will usually be 15 mm shorter.

Prepress 255

fold

short

trim short

Sheet

A Two colour one side

C Full colour section

2345678

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Flat plans■

enable you to clearly see the distribution of different colour specifications

according to where they will fall on the printed sheets and sections.

Quick print preparation

Much quick print is now exclusively digital or photocopied,

rather than printed traditionally. In the case of digital

printing, you simply supply a digital ﬁle. To save money it

should be prepared with no bleed and 3–5 mm clearance on

all edges.

For photocopying, provide a master that:

r uses black ink only with no screens unless you provide

screened artwork to be shot dot-for-dot (or better, some

other halftone technique such as a line screen—detail

needs to be rugged for quick print)

r has no bleed

r has a 10 mm grip edge on at least one edge—the same

edge on both sides of the sheet

r is a standard size (A4), or is bled artwork to ﬁt on a

standard size (e.g. so it will print bleeds and trim marks

on an A4 sheet) and guillotine it to a smaller size

r has no registration marks—trim the artwork to actual

size and do not mount it (slip it into a manilla folder,

plastic sleeve or envelope).

DOING IT SMARTER

Photocopied dummies

Assemble and supply the printer with

a photocopied dummy (sample) of

the finished job. If they have any

queries about the imposition or order

of pages, they can quickly refer to

the dummy.

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Output resolution

There are two measurement systems used to generate

output. They are both expressed similarly and are often

confused. One describes the quality of digital output from

an imagesetter: dpi (dots per inch). The other describes the

resolution of the halftone dots for print reproduction: lpi

(lines per inch).

Dpi (dots per inch)

The resolution of your imagesetter or your printer is

deﬁned in dpi or dots per inch. An inch is approximately

25 mm. Ofﬁce laser printers have standard dpi settings at

300 or 600 dots per inch. Of course, with digital produc-

tion, these aren’t really ‘dots’ at all, they are pixels, or tiny

square picture elements. So 300 dpi means 300 pixels per

inch or roughly 12 pixels per millimetre.

When you look at a bromide from an imagesetter, you

are looking at a resolution of 2400 or 1200 dpi. This means

the pixels that make up the image are ﬁner—at 2400 dpi

there are about 96 pixels per millimetre. You get a much

smoother appearance to curves, circles and, of course, the

dots that make up halftone images.

Lpi (lines per inch)

Lines per inch or lpi refers to the resolution at which you

choose to reproduce an image. It depends on the printing

method and the paper chosen. For example, in newspapers,

it was standard for photograph reproduction to be set at

60 lpi, which is why the halftone dot screen in old news-

papers is so plainly visible.

In exclusive packaging, you might ﬁnd 300 lpi, but the

dot in this is barely visible with the naked eye. The differ-

ence between a 300 dpi pixel and the 300 lpi halftone dot

mentioned here is that the pixel is a speciﬁc-size square but

the halftone dot is a variable-size circular dot. As a result of

the need for this variable-size dot, you use a machine with

2400 dpi to create a 300 lpi output.

256 Production

DOING IT CHEAPER

Output resolution

There are times when paying for a

bromide of your file may not

necessarily increase the quality of

your final print job. Sometimes on a

recycled paper stock, the stock is so

absorbent that it can only give a soft

edge to type and graphics. A 300 dpi

or 600 dpi printout will be sufficient

on such a stock because the edge of

the type (which in a bromide would

be sharp) will print soft anyway.

Don’t waste money on high resolution

if you do not need it.

Photocopy enlargement and

reduction is cheaper than scanning

and bromiding and, in the case of

some very fast, very cheap jobs, is

okay with regard to quality,

particularly if quick-printed on

recycled stock.

Many books have their text

produced from laser prints of 300 dpi

or 600 dpi resolution because to get

bromides for each page would be too

expensive. Even if you could get each

bromide for $5, a 100-page, single-

colour book will cost $500.

A simple way to increase the

resolution is to go to your print set-

up box and enlarge your printout to

133%. When you take the pages to

the printer, ask the printer to reduce

them back to 75% when the job is

printed. It will increase the resolution

to 400 dpi or 800 dpi respectively.

Direct-to-plate or computer-to-

plate (CTP) digital technology avoids

this costly intermediate stage.

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Prepress 257

Comparing different

output resolutions

While stochastic screening is

described in microns, lpi equivalents

have been used here for ease of

comparison.

60 lpi ■

2400 dpi

100 lpi ■

2400 dpi

200 lpi ■

2400 dpi

300 lpi ■

2400 dpi

300 lpi ■

stochastic screening

200 lpi ■

stochastic screening

100 lpi ■

300 dpi

60 lpi ■

300 dpi

60 lpi ■

stochastic screening

Conventional halftoning ■

an enlargement

Stochastic screening ■

an enlargement

DWD-DM07 4/5/01 4:03 PM Page 257

Proofing

Do as much checking on screen as possible throughout the

production process. This avoids unnecessary printing and

paper waste. However, there are set points at which it is

usual to generate a printout for prooﬁng.

The ﬁrst of these is at editorial stage, where the text

document is printed for an editor to read and correct.

Corrections may well be keyed directly on-screen, but the

printout is useful, because screen resolution is less than

printer resolution and small details like punctuation can be

confusing on-screen.

The next stage is page proofs. Pages are assembled with

the revised text document ﬂowed in and pictures, typefaces

and all design elements added. At this point, the editor may

be brought in to recheck the document, the designer checks

design details such as text and image positioning and

alignment, and the indexer starts the index.

The ﬁnal prooﬁng stage should be imposed proofs from

the imagesetter, which may be made up into a dummy of

the ﬁnal product.

Designers check that images have reproduced appropri-

ately—that their resolution is even, their colours correct and

they are correctly positioned in the picture boxes. They also

check that colours for backgrounds and text are correct and

that all the typefaces have translated correctly without

default fonts appearing (where the imagesetter could not

recognise a font, often because it was either not loaded,

identiﬁed inappropriately, or not supplied). They check

there are no production ﬂaws in the ﬁlm or output that may

have been caused by scanned dust or lint, imperfections or

scratches in the ﬁlm.

Anyone involved with the job has their ﬁnal check. It is

signed off by the client as being ‘ready for print’ or ‘requir-

ing revision’. If there are many corrections, a revised proof

will be needed.

258 Production

Press checks

Designers often wish to see the

colours on press, because it is so

difficult to mock-up exactly how

colours will look when printed. When

the job is being printed, you might do

a ‘press check’ so that, if there is an

unforeseen problem, it can be

rectified ‘in-run’ rather than

reprinting. You will be expected to

sign-off a copy when it is right. It will

then become the referral copy for the

printer throughout the print run. Print

shops have lighting booths

specifically to ensure that you are

checking colour in standardised

lighting conditions.

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Printing

It is most important to develop a good relationship with

your printer and discuss the most appropriate printing

processes to achieve what you want.

There is a reason the apprenticeship and training time

for prepress, printing and ﬁnishing was more extensive

than the time it takes for most graphic designers to

graduate—there is much technicality to cover with many

nuances of application. You should not expect to know it

all by simply reading about it.

In the prepress area, do not expect to be able to do it to

the same level of expertise just because you have a software

program that can prepare materials similar to some of

those processes.

The best advice for learning about printing is to visit

printers and prepress houses and ask questions. Heed the

advice you receive and your product will beneﬁt. Sound

production knowledge enables you to create innovative

design solutions that are founded in a production reality—

your client will be able to afford to produce your design

and you will be able to produce the ﬁnished artwork for

its manufacture.

Here then, are just brief descriptions of the main

processes you will encounter in printing and ﬁnishing.

There are a few tips and hints included but the most

important one is talk with your suppliers.

Preprints

If you wish to maintain your corporate colours across a

range of material without having to print them each time,

think about preprinting some standardised sheets on an

appropriately coloured and weighted sheet of paper with

one or more of your corporate inks. You can then overprint

in black as required. Black is used for ease; you can print

directly from your laser printer or photocopy, saving time

and money. You can repeat the logo or some motif from

the graphic identity.

259

DOING IT CHEAPER

Ganging-up

Maybe you could get together a

group of people or organisations that

could use their combined buying

power to increase their print options,

such as using process colour. All

people would need to agree to use

the same colours on the same paper,

and have the same number of copies

(remember, if everyone wants 5000

copies and you want 10 000, it just

means you print two-up of yours). If

you print 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 originals at

once, you start seeing printing

economies and you can share the

savings.

DOING IT SMARTER

Environmentally friendly

trimmings

If you avoid bleeding images and

bands of colour off the edges of a

cover or poster, the printer’s waste

(the trimmings off the sheet) will be

cleaner and require less de-inking,

thereby avoiding use of further

chemicals in the processing prior to

recycling.

DWD-DM07 4/5/01 4:03 PM Page 259

By preprinting, you can save printing two or three

colours for every issue of your newsletter or pamphlet

series—you need only overprint the information that

changes each time. It is worth considering the possibility of

preprinting newsletter shells or pamphlet shells—blanks

that have only the standard information on them. Usually

you include the corporate logo, the masthead of the

newsletter (not the edition number and date), the contact

addresses, phone and fax numbers, Web URLs and e-mail

addresses (if they are not likely to change in the near

future) and contents box (without the contents list). Then

each time you come to print again, you need overprint only

one colour.

If you produce 1000 newsletters every month in two

colours, preprint the second colour and leave the text colour

(usually black) off. Print the annual supply (12 000 sheets)

at the beginning of the year as a one-off, one-colour job.

The paper is purchased upfront and stored, and you will

save signiﬁcantly over the year. For the 12 issues, you can

overprint 1000 of the preprinted sheets as a one-colour job

(in this case, probably black). Your newsletter will look like

you printed two colours but, because the paper was pre-

purchased, you pay only for one-colour printing monthly.

Entertainment organisations and promoters regularly

use this technique for theatre, concert and event posters—

leaving a blank area on the poster for overprinting the

details of local performances. In this way, they can afford to

have full colour in all venues without the cost of individual

print runs. The same savings can be made in programs,

ﬂyers and pamphlets; just leave an area or a panel for

overprinting the changing details.