Expert: Alex Gray - 6/25/2005

Question
Hi Alex.
Can you tell me something about preparing file for press in Corel Draw. Converting text to curves... and all that stuff.
I just did some A3 poster and should give it for press, but don't know how to corectly prepare it. Please help, couse I will do a lot of similar posters in the future and I would like to learn how too do prepress for those.
Thanks for your time.
Nikola

Answer
Nikola

This is quite a big subject - too much for comprehensive advice in this forum. But I will do my best to point you in the right directions.

One single piece of advice which I think is more important than any other. That is to use PDF file format as the method of sending files to your printer.

This should allow you to be reasonably sure than your printer can print the job as you see it. If you have PDF settings set to 'embed all fonts' you should not have to worry about converting text to curves. I would convert to curves only if there are places where a single symbol or large word is the only use of an extra font.

As well as sending the PDF, you should also send a low-resolution JOEG image or physical printout of the page so you can be sure your printer knows how it is intended to appear. If you do this, it is important to make sure you mark these reference copies as 'visual guide only - not for reproduction', to avoid the printer trying to use them as the master copy.

There are two other important matters:

1) all graphics and photos should use CMYK, not RGB or other colour forat. This means you must be particularly sure to convert any bitmaps into CMYK before sending to to press.

2) if your poster requires background colour or images right to the esdge of the page, then you must allow a 'bleed' area of 3mm all around the final sheet size (ie for your backround colours/images should extend off the page by at least 3mm), and there should be crop marks to indicate to the printer where the page is trimmed.

Draw can produce these, but unfortunately in some versions it does not appear to include them in PDFs it creates. I get around this by creating my PDFs externally by 'printing' to file using A3+ sheet size in Draw, and then using Acrobat Distiller to convert to a print file.
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Those are the most important things to achieveing a successful press out put in my opinion.

If you are going to be printing thousands of copies, then it is also worth the expense of asking the printer for a proof copy to approve before the final press run is started.

Hope that has helped.

Alex