Your in-plant is slick. You’ve got the latest and greatest in print engines and a stealthy prepress workflow. But, what good is it when the front end of the process is replete with bad files — customer - supplied content that’s poorly prepared and requires time and expense to fix?

This is a problem many printing organizations — and in-plants, instant print shops, large-format print suppliers and general commercial printing companies — face today. Content coming into many printing plants just isn’t good.

July 7th, 2008

by Jeff Gamet

Adobe Announces Acrobat Pro 9, Creative Suite 3.3

by Jeff Gamet, 12:05 AM EDT, June 2nd, 2008

Adobe announced Acrobat Pro 9, the next version of its PDF viewing and editing application, along with Creative Suite 3.3 on Monday. Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 will include native Flash support, enhanced collaboration tools like PDF Portfolios, improved print production tools, and support for Adobe PDF Print Engine 2.

PDF Portfolios lets Acrobat users bundle documents, images and videos together as packages with summaries, create PDF forms and collect and analyze form data without requiring IT department involvement. Portfolios are compatible with the new (in beta) Acrobat.com hosted services that support document collaboration.

What Does Preflighting The Design Mean?

As a graphic designer, has this ever happened to you?

The scenario: You’ve sent your marketing masterpiece that you have meticulously designed to your printer. The deadline is tight, but you made it. Then the phone rings. Its your printer calling to let you know they are having problems printing your piece. You are about ready to scream because the client is waiting to get this piece out to his customers.

QualityLogic Press Release

QualityLogic to Launch Three Products at drupa
QualityLogic, a provider of leading-edge QA and QC test tools and services for the imaging and telecom industries, will launch three products at Drupa 2008, May 29 to June 11, at the Dusseldorf Fairgrounds, in Dusseldorf, Germany. QualityLogic will be in Booth # 7.0E (Hall 7, Stand E).

QualityLogic will launch:

• XPS eXaminer – a powerful tool, for developers and test engineers that allows users to open any XPS document file and examine, analyze, validate, edit and manipulate it for testing purposes.

by Claudia McCue
April 2008

If like many designers you are in the process of making the big switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign, you know it is not a trivial undertaking. You have to retrain your brain to a new way of working and remind your fingers which keys to hit for those newfangled shortcuts. You are in a hurry to get up to speed, and you have just been asked to create a client’s next newsletter in InDesign. The template for the newsletter is currently in QuarkXPress. You’ve finally come to that fork in the road: Do you build a new newsletter template from scratch, or do you take the easy way out and just open the file with InDesign? If there’s a lot of work in the template, go for File > Open. While it’s surprising this works at all, you should know what converts and what does not.

preflight: quality check your files

What is a preflight quality check?

It is a final look through all your production files in order to do a last quality check before they leave your building. This not only saves time as it hopefully eliminates many common project-delaying errors, but it also saves money as a final quality and content check ensures all the client’s colours are correct and all the project specifications are adhered to.

I have always felt it is best to have someone other than the production artist look over the files as a fresh set of eyes is more likely to catch potential problems.