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  1. J

    Mythbusting! (A bit of fun)

    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...
  2. J

    starting small print shop. need advice

    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...
  3. J

    Convert Pantone to CMYK

    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...
  4. J

    300dpi vs 350dpi and 150lpi vs 175 lpi

    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...
  5. J

    Career direction advice needed

    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...
  6. J

    Links and Pages

    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...
  7. J

    Does anyone know of software that can do this?...

    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.
  8. J

    CTP, CTP operator and Offsite Graphic Designer

    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...
  9. J

    Bizarre Separation Issue

    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...
  10. J

    MS Publisher question

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

    Acrobat Security

    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...
  12. J

    Acrobat Security

    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...
  13. J

    Does Screen resolution effect type

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

    PDF for Printer

    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...
  15. J

    Print Ready PDF settings out of Publisher

    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...
  16. J

    Difference between 1 bit & 8 bit tiffs?

    Sorry, but 1-bit is NOT 2 shades of gray. A single bit is either on or off. Thus black or not black. There is no gray involved. And in printing (like on a press) there are also no shades of gray, so all printing plates/film are 1-bit. Gray is achieved via screening.
  17. J

    Crop Image Data in PDF

    This question bothers me. Why would you want to do this? Especially in PDF. If the PDF has the image properly cropped to its frame, what is the problem with the excess being there? I get really nervous when someone downstream wants to mess with something that was done upstream. If it's an issue...
  18. J

    Save TIFF as ZIP or LZW compression

    Fiatlux doesn't say how he's currently archiving, but I'll bet that since he's asking about compression that he doesn't have it on a RAID. Probably CD or DVD. I agree that a hot-swappable RAID would always be a good idea, but most folks here don't have those kinds of resources. They don't even...
  19. J

    Save TIFF as ZIP or LZW compression

    So where do you archive that you can be sure that what you archive to won't crap out? My main point was that storage is cheap, so why compress. Compression is just to save space so you can store more on a given medium. Archiving is always a problem. What technology will still be around in 5...
  20. J

    Save TIFF as ZIP or LZW compression

    In this day and age I'm actually surprised that you feel you need to compress at all. ZIP and LZW are lossless but they don't compress very much. Jpeg is lossy which means that data is "thrown away" each time you compress the image. Not considered a good idea as multiple compressions will be...

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