Print Specifications
Please ensure you understand the Print Specifications – Rules of Engagement before ordering any product. If you are unsure of anything, please call Sales Advantage on 1300 885 042 for further clarification.
Avoid using web graphics
It is highly advisable to avoid using any graphics, logos or images which you have downloaded from the web, unless you are certain that they are high-resolution graphics specifically for printing. Screengrabs or pictures cut and pasted direct from web pages look fine on screen, but will look very poor when printed and should be avoided wherever possible. This is particularly important if you are setting up a poster or any item where you want to blow up a graphic or picture so that it prints out at a large size.
Do not use transparent backgrounds
This applies to customers who have not created their artwork in Coreldraw, Adobe Illustrator or other graphic applications such as Indesign. Transparent backgrounds tend to crop up in Word and Powerpoint when setting up tables and backgrounds for posters. Office will allow you to make a background colour ‘transparent’ to reduce its intensity or let an image behind show through. This looks fine on screen but it causes all sorts of problems when we try to print it. Often, a transparent background will turn into a messy crosshatched pattern when it is printed, and it will rarely come out as intended. We would advise against using transparent colours in Office wherever possible.
Image Resolution (Raster Graphics vs Vector Graphics)
There are 2 main kinds of graphics types: vector graphics and raster graphics. Vector graphics can be enlarged or reduced in size without affecting the quality of the printed result. Most graphics, however, are raster graphics, which means that they are made up of a finite number of dots or pixels. For instance, you might have a picture file which is 600 pixels by 300 pixels in size – and this will not change, no matter how much you enlarge or reduce the size of the picture on the page. So if you make the picture 2 inches wide by 1 inch high, it’s resolution will be 300 dpi (dots per inch). This is the maximum size you can make this particular picture without compromising its quality when it is printed. If you enlarge the picture to 10 centimetres wide by 5 centimetres high, its resolution will drop to 150 dpi, because you’ve got the same number of pixels spread over a greater area. This will impair the output quality when you print it. For printing purposes, all your graphics must be a minimum of 300 dpi to print cleanly. Web graphics and screengrabs are usually only 72 dpi, which looks OK on screen, but terrible when you print them out. It won’t help you to use your graphics program (e.g. Photoshop) to increase the resolution of a web graphic from 72 dpi to 300 dpi – you can’t improve upon the quality you had in the first place – you need to ensure that your graphics are set up at the correct resolution from the start.
Include bleed and trim marks
When preparing and uploading files it is imperative to include minimum 4mm bleed to ALL artwork that has image or colour extending outside the trim marks. If you do not put trim marks on your artwork we will not accept responsibility for the job being off centre. (As seen in the print specifications throughout our website)
Internal borders – vitally important
If you have artwork with borders that go to the finished edge of any printed job, it is imperative that they be at least 3mm thick from the edge of the finished product. Our trimming tolerance is +/- 1mm, so if your internal borders are set at 2mm, you may end up with a border which is 3mm at one side and 1mm at the other.
Ink saturation
Be very mindful of not using to much ink coverage. As a rule never use more then 300 % ink coverage i.e. 100C 100M 100Y 0K =300% ink out of a maximum 400%.The more saturated the colours the more difficult it is to dry, trim, fold etc and could cause scuffing or set off.
Logos
Clients must submit logos in either JPEG, TIFF, EPS or PDF format. For optimal resolution we recommend EPS or PDF logos created from their original vector format. Sales Advantage is not liable for any low resolution graphics submitted by you for printing purposes.
Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher)
Microsoft Office is the most common suite of programs used for generating documents for printing, simply because it is available to most PC users. However it is not designed to automatically generate documents which are suitable for printing on press, and most documents need to be manipulated or converted into a suitable format before they can be printed. In most cases, Sales Advantage will be able to undertake this work for you.
Other graphics file formats
Many programs allow you to export your document as a graphics file, which, like PDF, will allow you to embed all the fonts and graphics in a single file. There are dozens of different graphics file formats, the most common being JPEG (.jpg), TIFF (.tif) and EPS (.eps). However, saving your document in these formats should be approached with great caution. A lot of programs, notably Microsoft Office, will allow you to save your documents as Jpegs or Tiffs very easily, but do not give you any control as to the image quality of the resulting graphics file. In most cases, the resolution of the graphics file will default to 72 dpi – which is low quality, suitable for screen viewing but not for printing. This is a particular issue in Powerpoint and can cause big problems when Powerpoint is used to create artwork, particularly for posters. The other difficulty with turning your documents into graphics files is that the resulting files tend to be massive (in terms of memory) and very difficult to handle – they might be too large even to fit on a USB stick. Because of this we do not recommend that graphics file formats other than PDF are used.
PDF (Portable Document Format)
PDF is becoming increasingly popular as a method for submitting artwork for printing, because it generates smaller files and, when used correctly, it ensures that all graphics and fonts are properly embedded so that they will print correctly no matter what computer you print them from. Most graphic programmes such as Coreldraw, Adobe Illustrator and Indesign, come fitted with a tool to covert graphics to PDF. However more common programmes like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher commonly require a third party programme such as Adobe Acrobat to convert your artwork to PDF. Most PCs have Acrobat Reader installed on them, but this does not allow you to generate PDF files – only read them. The full version of the program is required to generate PDF files, but it isn’t free!
Whilst we accept other file formats, PDF’s are definitely the most preferred file format. Make sure that you choose the right quality setting, Ensure all fonts are embedded and all colours and images are CMYK.
PDF - Choose the right quality setting
Most PDF writers will give you some kind of choice as to what level of quality you want your PDF to be. This will either be in the form of a description (e.g. “low quality”, “standard”, “press quality”), or output resolution (e.g. 72dpi, 300dpi, 1200dpi), or both. As a rule of thumb, it is usually best to choose the highest available quality setting, as it’s safest to make your PDF better quality than you need.
Look for “print quality”, “press quality” or “high quality” and 300dpi resolution or more. “Low quality” or “screen quality” or resolution between 72dpi and 150dpi will not usually yield good results and should therefore be avoided.
NB: even if you’ve selected “press quality” and 1200dpi, if the document you’re printing contains low resolution graphics (e.g. screengrabs or web graphics), the resulting PDF will not necessarily be print quality – you can’t improve on the quality of the graphics you’ve used in the first place!
RGB vs CMYK Colour
There are several ways in which computers handle colour in picture files, the main 2 colour modes being RGB colour and CMYK colour. RGB colour is based on properties of light, and is suitable when images are to be viewed on screen, not for printing with ink or toner on paper. CMYK colour is based on properties of ink and should always be used when a colour image is to be printed. The colour mode of your graphics files can be set to CMYK from within your graphics program. In addition to RGB and CMYK colour, you may also need to work with Pantone colour. The Pantone Matching System is a universally accepted system which allows you to specify the exact colour ink you want to use, based on a pre-defined colour scale.
RGB Files should not be uploaded
If you upload files that are RGB they will automatically be converted to CMYK - this conversion is not a recommended outcome as many colours may not output with required results - (e.g. quite often when an RGB yellow is converted to CMYK it may convert with a percentage of Cyan in the CMYK mix which can give it a limey yellow appearance). Sales Advantage will not accept responsibility for the outcome of such files.
Use page breaks
This is particularly important for long documents set up in Word. Word tends to reformat documents automatically, which can cause text to reflow from one page to another, particularly if you transport the file between different computers. This can result in problems like the pages re-numbering so they no longer agree with your Contents page, or section headings appearing at the bottom of a page with no content beneath them. This can easily be prevented by inserting page breaks where appropriate, instead of just hitting the Return key until you reach a new page.
Use common fonts
This is particularly important for customers not submitting their artwork in an embedded PDF format. It is always sensible to stick to standard fonts like Arial, Comic Sans, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Lucida Console, Palatino Linotype, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Verdana, MS Sans Serif, Symbol, Wingdings, Times New Roman, as these are installed on virtually every PC – so whichever PC you open your file on, the fonts will always appear the way you are expecting. PCs can only display and print fonts which are installed on them, so if you use a special or unusual font, there is a good chance that we won’t have it installed on our computers, and we won’t be able to print it correctly. Customers who do not embed their fonts in PDF and send us files in their original format (eg Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher), must be aware that their fonts will not be embedded into their artwork. When we open your artwork, if we do not have your fonts, our computer system will detect the closest suggested font match. Please be aware that we will not be held liable for any font changes, created by customers not submitting their artwork in embedded PDF format. When submitting files in PDF, just like Microsoft Office, if our PC doesn’t have the fonts you have used in your document installed on it, it will substitute them for something else. However, you can choose to embed all the fonts you have used in your PDF when you write it. If you do this, it won’t matter whether we have the fonts you have used or not – the PDF will contain enough information to make sure that your fonts print out correctly.