Production for Print

Preface

For the past twenty-five years, I have worked extensively in the commercial printing industry and also as a graphic designer, both in the US and in England. I am constantly running into other graphic designers who have a three-year degree course or similarly extensive training behind them, or who have even been working in the industry for years, but who nevertheless have little or no idea about the actual requirements of the printing process. As a result, every time they send a job to their printers, they experience nail-biting anxiety because they don’t know exactly how it is going to turn out.

The gray areas that cause this anxiety include dot gain, image calibration, trapping, the use of CMYK vs. RGB, and generating error-free PDF ...