Save yourself from design errors in printing 2

Overall document settings

• Page dimensions: Make sure you use the exact dimensions that the customer specified for the job. Also take care that the proper bleed is applied on all pages. Don’t be sloppy but use an identical value (e.g. 5 mm) throughout the document.
• Page numbering: Odd pages are on the right hand side, even pages to the left (don’t laugh, I have seen documents in which this basic rule was forgotten.)
  
• Folding panels: Be aware of folding panels. Not all pages in a folding panel have the same size! Do your work at the exact size of the printed piece and allow for proper margins where you want it to fold.
• Dot gain: Imagesetters should be set up to give linear output. This means that if you use a 50 percent flat on a page somewhere, the output on film or plate should also measure 50 percent. The printing process, however, is not linear. Due to the pressure of rollers, the absorption of ink by the paper and some optical effects as well, that 50 percent flat may well get printed as a 65 percent. The actual percentage of dot gain depends on the paper used, speed of the press, screen ruling, operator, the type of press used, the quality of blankets and other parameters. A dot gain of about 10 to 16 percent is not uncommon in sheetfed offset printing. For newspaper printing, this dot gain can even grow to 30 percent. Most (all?) scanner software uses default settings that compensate for the average sheetfed offset printing dot gain. Your layout should take the dot gain into account as well, especially if the job will be printed on various types of paper and presses. Consult your printer before starting critical jobs.

Color

• Spot colors: Most printers keep a supply of ‘standard’ Pantone colors. Using these colors in a job can be much cheaper than using a specific PMS color that has to be ordered separately.
• Spot colors in a CMYK job: If you use a number of Pantone colors in a job that will be printed in CMYK, you should mark these colors for separation in the layout program. This is especially true if you are using transparency in InDesign. Refer to the manual of your layout application for the correct procedure to mark colors for separation.
• 4+ colors: If your jobs will be printed in more than 4 colors, it may be worth to talk to a couple of printers. Not only may some offer you a better price because they have a 6 or 8-color press but they can also tell you how your design has to be adapted so they can easily print the additional colors.
• QuarkXPress red, green and blue: Never use the Red, Green and Blue colors from QuarkXPress. These are RGB-colors that are routinely switched off by prepress operators.
• Black in overprint: In most cases, black text, lines and fills that overlap colorized backgrounds should be set to overprint. If this is forgotten, it may cause white spaces when the job is printed out of register.

• Rich black: For small black objects that are partly positioned on a light background and partly on a darker background, it is better to use a “rich black”. This is 100 percent black with 40 percent cyan and/or magenta added to it. This way the background does not shine through the black object. The top bar in the example below shows the problem. You can find more info about rich black on this page.
  
• White set to knock-out: Older versions of QuarkXPress had the annoying habit of forgetting to switch off ‘overprint’ settings when black text is changed to another color. This can cause the text to disappear. Make sure white text is set to ‘knock-out’. Most modern workflows used by printers can automatically detect and fix this problem but that knowledge won’t help you much if your job gets printed by the only printer in town who can’t fix this automatically.
  
• Naming conventions: When you use spot colors in a file, their names should only contain the standard 27 characters of the alphabet and numerals to 0 to 9. Use an underscore instead of a space if you want to separate words in the name of a color. Using brackets of any kind can lead to various PostScript problems on some systems.
• Color matching: Some colors like clear oranges, violets, and greens as well as a significant part of the Pantone colors that exist are difficult to match in 4-color CMYK printing. Unless carefully calibrated, monitors always show brighter and more saturated colors than can be achieved in printing.

Text and fonts

• Font types: By preference, you should use OpenType fonts. Type 1 or TrueType fonts are also OK but try to avoid Multiple Master or older Type 3 fonts. A lot of systems no longer properly support these fonts.
• City fonts: Older Macintoshes come with a series of fonts that are named after cities (e.g. Geneva, Chicago or New York). Avoid using these fonts as older versions of the Mac operating system only supply them as screen fonts which are not suitable for output. This rule does not apply to ‘Memphis’.
• Style menu: Don’t use stylized fonts, select the fonts by their long names name. So select ‘Helvetica bold’ as a font instead of selecting ‘Helvetica’ and then clicking on the “bold” style button. Some applications do not show all font faces for TrueType fonts. It that case, you can use the different styles if you are sure the corresponding font exists.
• Outline fonts: Try to avoid the underscore or outline fonts from QuarkXPress or other applications. These are gimmicks that can look great on screen but are sometimes impossible to output correctly.
• Spelling: Always use the spell checker that is included in most applications to check your document. Add words that appear frequently in your documents to the custom dictionary.
• Cross-platform issues: Avoid moving from one platform (e.g. Mac) to another (e.g. PC) because this can cause text to shift slightly. Some fonts that are available on both Mac and PC differ slightly, even if they use the same name.
• Colorized text: Don’t colorize small text (e.g. < 8 points) in 2 or more process colors. The slightest registration problem on the press makes such text illegible.

Rectangles, fills and lines

• Hairlines: Some applications have a line thickness that is called “hairline”. Never use this, always stick to a specific width, e.g. 0.25 points. The problem with hairlines is that they are imaged as the finest possible line on any given device. This may be fine on a 300 dpi laser printer but a 1 pixel wide line on a 2400 dpi imagesetter is hardly visible. Some workflows allow the operator to set a minimum line width to avoid this trap. Just don’t count on this workaround and avoid hairlines entirely. The smallest line width you can use depends on the press, paper, speed,… Consult your printer. As a general rule, never make a line smaller than 0.2 points.
• Total ink coverage: Depending on the paper stock, the type of printing process and the press itself, your printer can specify a certain ‘total ink coverage’ (TIC). This is the maximum amount of ink that any object on a page should contain. For example: if the TOC is 280, you can have objects on the page that contain 70 percent of cyan, magenta, yellow or black but a mixture of 100 percent cyan, 100 percent magenta, 50 percent yellow and 50 percent black has a TOC of 300 which is too much and will lead to smudging on the press.
• Solid colors: Avoid large areas of solid black ink which can be very difficult to print. Digital presses tend to have a problem with any large area that contains a solid color.
• Colorize thin lines: Don’t colorize thin lines (e.g. < 1/2 point) in 2 or more process colors.

Line-art

• File formats: Avoid file formats like PICT, GIF or BMP which were never meant for design purposes.
• Resolution: Make sure images have the correct size and resolution while scanning them. The final resolution of bitmaps should be somewhere between 800 and 1200 dpi. So if you scan a logo and want to enlarge it 300 percent in the layout application, it should be scanned at 2400 to 3600 dpi. For output on digital presses, a resolution of 600 dpi is often sufficient.
• Size: Never enlarge images more than 20 percent in your layout application. It will reduce the resolution of the images and lead to an effect called staircasing.