Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Bible

Chapter 35. Choosing Print Setups

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Choosing printers

• Working with print setups

Files created for print fall into two categories—designs for composite prints and designs for color separations or commercial printing. When you design documents for composite printing, your output device might be a laser printer, a desktop inkjet printer, a large-format inkjet printer, a color copier, a film recorder, or a high-end commercial color printer. Files designed for commercial printing are typically color-separated and printed to film, direct to plate, or direct to press.

This chapter is concerned with setting print attributes for composite color that may print to your office desktop printers as well as advanced settings for commercial devices designed for printing prepress.

Selecting Desktop Printers

The first step in printing files is to select the target printer and the print attributes associated with the printer, such as paper size, paper feed, paper tray, and so on. If you work as an independent designer in a small shop, you may have only one printer on your network. After you assign your printer as the default printing device, you don't need to worry about printer selection. However, if you work in production workflows in larger shops, you may have a variety of printers attached to your network. In these environments, it's essential you make the proper printer selection before sending off a job for print. Selecting printers varies between Mac OS and Windows.

Printer selection ...