Adobe® Acrobat® 8 PDF Bible

Chapter 32. Commercial Printing and Prepress

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Working with page sizes and printer's marks

• Previewing color on your monitor

• Flattening transparency in a file

• Working with trap presets

• Understanding Job Definition Files

• Checking files for successful printing

• Commercial printing

At some time or another, the files you output to your desktop printer may be candidates for offset printing. The tools and commands you use for desktop printers, as I explained in Chapter 31, are sufficient for printing to all the printers you have in your office and home. However, when printing PDF documents on commercial printing devices, you must address a number of issues.

For high-end digital prepress and commercial printing, Acrobat Professional includes all the print controls desired by the commercial printing community. Combined with features for previewing color, preflighting jobs, and printing color separations, Acrobat Professional ranks as a strong competitor against any layout or other professional applications designed to serve creative professionals. In this chapter I cover printing from Acrobat Professional using many commercial printing tools.

Setting Up the Work Environment

In Acrobat Professional only, you have a toolbar used specifically for print production. Open a context menu on the Toolbar Well and select Print Production. The Print Production toolbar opens as a floating toolbar, as shown in Figure 32.1.

For printing large documents and when soft proofing files, the Loupe tool is ...