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printing from PDF question
I have just designed a brochure in Word and exported it to PDF for the printers. I printed one myself at home from pdf and there are two options:
Shrink to printable area and Fit to printable area… What is the difference?
When I print from Word I am loosing a tiny bit at the end of the page, so I want to scale the whole thing a tiny bit. The brochure is folded in 3 and if I change the margin at the bottom of the page, the column on the front and first page won’t be centred anymore…
Shrink to printable area in PDF and the whole thing is out of line when folding the page…. 😮
Also (this might question might not be allowed).. what kind of price can I roughly expect to pay for 250 full colour, double sided prints, folded on 100 grms. paper? I thought the price quoted by the local printers was a bit high……(and I understand that small quantities are relatively expensive)….Thanks
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14 Replies
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Angelique, have you contacted these guys?….speak to Damien, great fella, for a Kerryman!. 😀 Excellent service…I can’t fault them on price and service. Some prices on the website.
http://www.traleeprinting.com -
For what you’re doing you’re better off printing to an A3 printer. You can then print to your exact A4 size. Obviously you’d have to trim the waste off. When you’ve done this the folds will be in the correct place. With some A4 printers you can print to the edge but this can cause a mess inside the printer with the inks running off the edge of the paper.
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Ouch….why design in Word?
Also I’m not sure but think the output from Word will be RGB not CMYK 😕
The printer will have a max print area it can print to. If it’s an Inkjet it has to hold on to the final edge of the sheet so will have a larger margin on the trailing edge as opposed to the leading edge.
If you use the full A4 page to design in or have bleed off the edges ‘Shrink to fit’ will scale it down to fit the printable area of you printer. If your design is smaller ‘scale to fit’ will enlarge the design to fit the printable area of your printer.
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quote Tim Painter:If you use the full A4 page to design in or have bleed off the edges ‘Shrink to fit’ will scale it down to fit the printable area of you printer. If your design is smaller ‘scale to fit’ will enlarge the design to fit the printable area of your printer.aha thanks for explaining that!
But if I do the design in Word or Illustrator does not make any difference to the printing area?!? The same problem would occur?!?!
I am just not sure that when I mail the pdf file (that looks right) to the printers, if it comes out as I want in terms of the layout on paper…… -
Yeah, most likely that’s what your printers margins are though. I’ve seen a few printers where you can adjust the margins slightly, but you will never get a full bleed on it for a home ink-jet / laser printer. Typically even the so called "border-less" printers are a pain to deal with. We have a Canon i9900 and it will only do border-less on certain page sizes. So the only other option (if you do have a bleed) is to design your brochure to not need a bleed, or over size it with crop marks and have it trimmed down.
You should call or email the printer that you’re thinking about using and get some kind of confirmation of the size of the print borders (if they have any). If they are doing offset printing then it will most likely need to be over-sized, with bleeds and crop marks.
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Any printer will shudder at the thought of having to use graphic artwork produced in Word. It will be a struggle at every step.
You also have to check that the output is CMYK not RGB. -
quote Peter Dee:Any printer will shudder at the thought of having to use graphic artwork produced in Word. It will be a struggle at every step.
You also have to check that the output is CMYK not RGB.Why is that? I have no problem re-doing it in Ilustrator or Coreldraw (and Corel used to be a problem I found……)
The moment you turn it into a pdf-file (as requested by the printers) I thought it would not make any difference in what software it was made? -
Shrink to fit will reduce oversize page to fit printer page – fit to page will increase page size to fit printer page.
Word will be rgb and your printer will need cmyk, a conversion will take place somewhere and because cmyk cannot reproduce the rgb gamut a screen can it is likely that vivid blue or red will actually print quit dull.
Corel or Illustrator will have colour management will basically try and display on screen what will actually print, Ensure you use cmyk when you design and ensure your pdf settings are correct ie fonts are embedded and colours do not swao models. Ensure you page size is correct, if you are doing a DL size 3 fold doing each page 99mm may not be right when folded.
I would speak to you print company for a little guidance or your finished article may not be what you expect.
Both Corel and Illustrator are more than capable of doing this job, Word less so. Word may be ok if your printing on your own desktop printer but not if it is for professional output.
Alan D -
Page size for each panel depends on Roll fold or ‘Z’fold.
‘Z’ looks like a ‘Z’ end on and roll is basically that, from one end folding like a roll.
With ‘Z’ fold you can set the panels to equal size.
With roll I would do something like 100mm 100mm 98mmThe front being 100mm the Centre 100mm and the one that end up in the middle once folded 98mm.
If you layout as landscape A4 you need to realise that one side from Left to Right the panels need to be 100mm / 100mm / 98mm
The flip side when you layout as A4 landscape needs to be 98mm / 100mm / 100mm panel width from left to right.I would work in Corel or Illustrator and drop boxes is at the right size for each page and use them as a template guide then delete at the end.
Your printer will call it a 6pp DL .
Ask if the want crop marks and bleed if anything bleeds off the page. Bleed is usually set to 3mm. When you create the PDF you can specify to add crops & bleeds.
Clear as mud…but I hope some help.
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quote Tim Painter:Clear as mud…but I hope some help.
Yeah right!!
So just so blondy here understands it all correctly:
-it does not matter that the PDF file looks exactly like I want it, the moment the printer gets it, they will shrink to fit and the lay-out gets messed up?
-Converting from Word can mess up the colours.
-setting the A4 in panels of 100 mm, 100 mm and 98 mm adds up to be 298mm: A4 is 297mm. Any reason for this mm difference?
I will redo the brochure in Illustrator on the weekend and this will tell if I really understood everything. But if it comes out of my home printer okay, does that mean it will be okay for the printers? -
Hi Angelique,
I was just wondering what you used to get your Word document into a pdf? I was under the assumption that Word doesn’t have a built in pdf creator. I might be wrong because I never use Word really. I know that pdf files also can vary by what program they came from and how they were made. I have 3 ways of making a pdf from FreeHand MX (which is what we use). I can export (works well most of the time), I can print to pdf (horribly large file size), and also I can print to postscript and run it through Distiller (works the best, but can have problems embedding the font.) I just want to mention this because all pdf files are not created equal. Sometimes the printer will need to make some adjustments to the clients file. If they have a pdf document and then try to open it in Illustrator it’s possible that the copy settings won’t come out as intended. I don’t know that will happen for sure, but I have gone from Freehand > pdf > Illustrator and the copy is absolutely butchered. Usually broken up into a bunch of separate text blocks and the margins have changed here and there.
I would still ask your printer though. Maybe ask if they could have a look at the pdf you made with the Word file to see if it’s production ready or not.
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Word! shudder the thought!
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quote Dave Rowland:Word! shudder the thought!
Sorry for upsetting you…… :lol1:
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Angelique It should of been 97mm not 98mm sorry…………..hate to confuse you anymore……lol
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