Recent content by John Clifford

While you certainly CAN use jpeg compression for images (that's what it's for--Joint PHOTOGRAPHIC Engineering Group), the use of jpeg for print should be used with caution. It's a lossy compression which means that each time you compress it, you lose some of the quality data. AND you certainly...

What I tell my students is to really think about this. You're a designer. Let's say you're paid $100/hr. to do design work. IS IT LIKELY THAT YOU'LL BE DOING THE PRINTING YOURSELF? If so it's unlikely that you'll get the same hourly rate you make to do design work. If you can afford to hire a...

Pantone colors (Pantone Solid that is) are formulated colors. If the color is "out of gamut" that means that it CANNOT be reproduced using CMYK. The most extreme examples are metallic and florescent colors. No matter what you do in converting them to CMYK, they will NEVER match a Pantone solid...

Yes! When I ask my design students what resolution they should scan images at, they all answer 300 dpi/ppi. When I ask them WHY? They have no idea. The dpi=2lpi at least gets them in the right range. I agree that you might want to go a little higher in the resolution so that you can enlarge a...

Some Options? Some Options? All of this experience in programming should be able to be used to get a variety of jobs in the printing industry. A couple to think about: MIS Systems: using your programming skills to integrate JDF to business systems. VDP: Again, using programming and database...

Sounds like this is what we in the olden analog days (pre 1984's introduction of the Mac) used to call an FPO. that was a "For Position Only" image that would be swapped out with the real image in stripping. The same is true for OPI (Open Prepress Interface) which would allow you to use very...

In PDF Forms you can create custom javascripts to do the kind of thing that you're requiring. My smart-ass answer is to find a teenager and get it done that way.

Trying to envision what you're describing. As a trainer of designers in the preparation of files to send to printers, I'm a little confused as to why you would have a designer doing imposition. The CTP RIP software that you get should have at least a basic imposition software that comes with it...

I'm going to guess that making it a PDF/X1-a is the problem. X-1a forces transparency to be flattened. Without seeing it, I'm going to again guess that there is something that is interacting with the transparency, in essence saying that this color and this color makes the original something with...

I agree, we see this a lot with Publisher because it's usually in RGB mode. AArrrrgggghhhhhh . . .

Sorry Michael, but the original post never indicated that it was a fully-automated workflow. Yes, in a VistaPrint, OneOver type of environment that's absolutely correct. But the majority of printers out there are still taking in PDFs, making corrections (as indicated in the original post) and...

Michael, I agree with you 100%. Now, reality is that if I don't accept some of the crap PDFs that are presented, the client will just go somewhere else where they WILL accept their PDFs, do a bunch of our mumbo jumbo (I'm sure you'd recognize some of the hoops we all go through to get these...

AND as long as the type is solid and not a tint. if it's a tint, it will be screened.

But remember that the printer must have an Adobe PDF Print Engine RIP (APPE) for PDF/X-4 to work. If they have an older RIP then you need to preflatten transparency. Remember, Postscript doesn't understand transparency and older RIPs use Postscript as the format from which they RIP. APPE uses...

While I don't know of any way of exporting or saving the file as grayscale from Publisher, if you have Acrobat Distiller you can print to distiller and choose Black and white as your color preference in the print dialogue box. OR distill to Postscript with Black and White as the preference...