Adobe® Acrobat® X PDF Bible

Chapter 29. Using Commercial Printing and Prepress

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Previewing color on your monitor

• Flattening transparency in a file

• Working with trap presets

• Cropping documents

• Optimizing files

• Understanding Job Definition files

• Preflighting files for successful printing

• Proofing and preparing files

• Prepping PDFs for 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 28, 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 Pro includes all the print controls that the commercial printing community desires. Combined with features for previewing color, preflighting jobs, and printing color separations, Acrobat Pro 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 Pro using many commercial printing tools.

Soft Proofing Color

Soft proofing color refers to viewing color on your monitor with a screen preview of the way color will be printed to hard copy. Soft proofing is a digital process whereby you use your computer monitor screen to preview things such as proper color assignments, overprints, separations, transparency, and similar ...