Prepress woes
Prepress woes
I would like to respond to her survey but our workflow really is unique and her questions only allowed me to answer a few as based on our work flow. The company I work for allows for the submission of PDF files as camera ready art. But because of one of our service providers we have to convert all of the received PDFs into Illustrator files, Freehand files, or .eps graphics with all text objects converted to outlines. WE need to do this to manipulate spacing between pages and panels in order to position how the artwork is to print to fit the dies we are using for each particular job. Customer's just create their forms as they want to see them, and they tell us what panel they want each form.
My main suggestions would be for her to tell her students would be not to create artwork for professional printing using any of the Microsoft office software since it really isn't made for using in commercial printing.
Word (which many of our art submissions are created in) will not tell you when it substitutes a font your customer used that you don't have in your system. It just substitutes. What appears to be strokes in Word actually are fills. Word, Excel are in the RGB color space and all have to be converted to CMYK.
PDFs made from Office software have clipping paths, and these have to be carefully eliminated in order to correct the color problems (in my experience anyway).
We do not have Quark on our computers so we can only deal with Quark files as PDFs. PDF files from Quark also have some hiccups. Each individual letter is a text box unto itself, so performing spellcheck is a nightmare. Clipping paths are abundant with each object on the page tied to the page/artboard size. In order to position these to order our mats we have to remove all of them being careful not to remove something that is hidden by a clipping mask.
Of course there are always the missing fonts. Our customers aren't graphic designers, so they don't realize that it would be helpful to give us copies of all the fonts they used in their file. If they did that we might be able to add them to our system (only if the originator is on a windows platform, we don't have MACs in our artroom). I think that I would stress the use of opentype fonts over the old standards of Postcript (type 1) fonts or true type fonts just because of the cross platform compatibility.
I think that I would stress to the designers that if they can, know where and how the files are to be printed in order that they get in contact with the printer and have long meaningful discussions with the prepress people on how they should submit their files. I know that it's a Utopian dream to think that we would ever get 90% of our files without some kind of problem but we can always hope.
It also would be great if there were classes out there where we prepress people could be taught how to trouble shoot the supposed camera ready art that gets sent to us rather than having to learn on the job as you go under deadline pressures.
I wish I could have said all this in her survey. And I know that all of you with the full color work have even more problems than we can in our small shop.
Bill J
