Creating print-friendly PDFs ensures a smooth production process. But many factors can throw your design off track. Keep these tips in mind.
When you send your PDF to the print provider, pre-press specialists put it through their own processes to make sure it doesn’t have any serious issues that may delay production. If you build and design your documents well, this process goes smoothly. But many factors can throw it off track, including not following the requirements of a particular press model. Fixing errors in pre-press mean lost time and money.
Introduced nearly 30 years ago by Adobe, PDFs — or Portable Document Format files are an efficient way of digitally sharing and outputting files across multiple platforms, including printing, losing no essential information in the transmission.
PDFs are built on a set of regulations. The PDF Standards Committee develops different versions of PDFs for various needs and manages the standards. These versions include PDF/a for digital or electronic archival documents or PDF/UA for accessibility purposes. Common options for printing are PDF/X for general commercial work and PDF/VT for variable and transactional documents.
PDF/X is a format that ensures materials print exactly as designers create them on the screen, including images, colors, fonts, logos, and so on. Designers can include only static elements in these documents, meaning each impression in a print run must be similar.
PDF/VT is for outputting personalized variable documents such as bills, invoices, statements, or variable promotions. With this standard, it’s possible to include elements, such as images, logos, text blocks, and entire page descriptions that are different on each page and come from separate spreadsheets and databases.
This offers a few advantages. One is time savings during RIPing — a process that prepares a file for the press. Rather than RIPing every single page in a print run, the basic template or structure of a PDF/VT job is RIP’d once; only variable elements are RIP’d individually, making the process faster. Eliminating just a few seconds per printed page can add up to significant time savings in the long run.
Another advantage is data safety. Keeping sensitive information like credit card numbers in its own database makes it easier to protect the safety and integrity of the data.
When you send your PDF to the print provider, pre-press specialists put it through their own processes to make sure it doesn’t have any serious issues that may delay production. If you build and design your documents well, this process goes smoothly. But many factors can throw it off track, including not following the requirements of a particular press model. Fixing errors in pre-press mean lost time and money.
Let’s look at the most common issues that stand in the way of a good PDF. As with most jobs, your first step is to contact your printer early in the process, especially with variable jobs, so experts can give you the specific requirements they need to output your designs properly.