Print

Apr 17, 20268 min readGuideBy Argo Shipping

What a printer needs from your file

The fastest print jobs are the ones where the file is right the first time. The slow ones are almost never slow because of the press; they are slow because artwork went back and forth three times over a missing eighth of an inch. Here is what makes a file press-ready, what we check for you, and the one category of problem no printer can catch.

The six things that matter

1. Bleed, and why an eighth of an inch causes so much trouble

If any color, image, or background touches the edge of your finished piece, the artwork has to extend past the trim line. Cutting is accurate but not perfect, and without that margin a slight shift leaves a thin white line along one edge. Once you see it on 5,000 copies you never forget it.

The convention is an eighth of an inch of bleed on every side that bleeds. Just as important is the inverse: keep anything you cannot afford to lose, especially text, well inside the trim. A safety margin of an eighth to a quarter inch inside the trim line is the habit that prevents trimmed-off page numbers.

If your design has a white border and nothing touches the edge, you do not need bleed. That is a legitimate design choice and it is occasionally slightly cheaper, because bleed consumes press sheet space.

2. Resolution

Print needs far more pixel data than screens. The working standard is 300 pixels per inch at final printed size, and that last part is where people come unstuck: a 300 ppi image enlarged to twice its size in the layout is effectively 150 ppi and will look soft.

The most common version of this problem is artwork pulled from a website. Web images are optimized to be small, which is the opposite of what print needs. If a logo only exists as a small web file, ask whoever made it for vector artwork, which scales to any size without losing quality.

3. Fonts

A font that lives on your computer does not travel with your file unless you make it. The reliable fix is to export a PDF with fonts embedded, which most design applications do by default. The belt-and-braces version, for logos and display type especially, is to convert text to outlines so it becomes artwork rather than text.

The failure mode here is quiet and expensive: a substituted font can shift an entire layout without anything looking obviously broken, which means it can survive a casual proof review.

4. Trim size and page count

Tell us the finished size you want and build the file to it. Two specific traps. If your piece is folded, the flat size and the finished size are different numbers and both matter. And saddle-stitched books must have a page count in multiples of four, because each folded sheet produces four pages. A 22-page saddle-stitched booklet is not a thing, and finding that out late costs a day.

5. Color space

Screens make color with light and presses make it with ink, so the two do not have identical ranges. Some vivid screen colors, especially bright oranges and electric blues, cannot be reproduced exactly in process printing. A file built in RGB will get converted, and the conversion may shift colors slightly.

This matters most for brand colors. If a specific color has to be exact, that is a spot ink match rather than a process build, which is a specialty operation. It carries a 1,000-piece minimum, is quoted by hand, and is worth it when brand consistency genuinely requires it.

6. One file, or a clearly labeled set

For a book, the clean submission is a cover file and an interior file, correctly paginated in reading order. Single pages named inconsistently are where mistakes enter. If you have a combined file, or a pile of files that need parsing and assembling, that is fine too, and it is worth knowing that it becomes a hands-on prepress service where a person reviews and assembles everything by hand rather than an automated path.

What we check, and the one thing we cannot

Send your own artwork and we will check it for anything that will cause trouble on press: resolution, bleed, fonts, trim. What we cannot check is content: spelling, pricing, dates, and the rights to what is in the file stay yours. The proof shows you exactly what will print, which is why we do not run until you have approved it.

That division is worth taking seriously, because the errors that hurt most are on the content side. We have no way of knowing that a price should be $49 rather than $499, that an event is on the 14th rather than the 4th, or that a name is misspelled. A proof is your opportunity to catch exactly those, and it is the only opportunity that exists before the press runs.

One practical note on barcodes: our system flags whether a barcode is present in your artwork, which is a useful catch when a piece needs one. It tells you the barcode is there; it does not validate that the code is correct. Verifying the digits encode what you intend stays with you.

Why the proof is the whole standard

The approved proof is the reference for the whole run. It is how we know what you wanted, and it is how you hold us to it: if the finished job does not match your approved proof because of an error on our end, we reprint it or refund it. It also means the approval is worth a careful read. Once a proof is approved, what is on it is what runs. We record who approved each proof and when, so there is never a question about which version the press worked from. The terms.

Digital proof or physical proof?

You get a digital proof as standard, at no separate charge, and selecting a proof is not optional. A digital proof is the right tool for content, layout, and position: is the text correct, is everything in the right place, does the pagination work.

A physical proof is a printed sample mailed to you, and it is a paid addition. It answers different questions, and they are questions a screen genuinely cannot: what the stock feels like, how the coating looks under real light, whether the color is right, whether the book lies flat.

Color shifts a little between screens, stocks, and presses. That is physics, not a defect. If color has to land exactly, ask for a hard-copy proof and we will match the job to the proof you hold in your hand. Digital proofs are for content, layout, and position; a hard-copy proof is the one that sets the color standard.

The rule of thumb: if the piece is expensive, large-run, color-critical, or physically unusual, pay for the physical proof. It costs a fraction of a reprint.

How to review a proof properly

Proof review fails in a predictable way: the person who designed the piece reviews it, and they read what they meant rather than what is there. Four habits that help.

• Have someone who did not build it read it. Fresh eyes catch what familiar eyes skip.
• Check the facts against a source, not from memory. Prices, dates, phone numbers, URLs, and names. Read them character by character against the original.
• Look at the edges and the gutter. Is anything too close to the trim? On a bound book, does anything disappear into the spine?
• Read the pagination as a sequence. Page order errors are easy to introduce and easy to skim past.

The bottom line

A press-ready file is not complicated: right size, bleed where needed, enough resolution, fonts handled, sensible page count. We will catch the technical problems and tell you about them. What we cannot catch is whether the words are right, which makes proof review your job and the most valuable twenty minutes in the whole project.

Get the file right and print becomes boring, which is the correct state for print to be in.

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