Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications

Creating Plates

In the earlier days of electronic desktop publishing, film was output for individual pages, and then taped down in flats on large, clear carrier sheets in the proper printing position. (A flat is just that: a flat carrier sheet with one or more pieces of film in final position.) These imposed flats were used to expose printing plates with powerful light sources. Because intermediate films were stripped and combined to create the page films, and then the page films used to expose the plates (or to create huge, composite single films for each plate), some tiny details could be eroded by the multiple generations of exposures. Any errors in aligning the individual pieces would affect the quality on press.

The introduction of computer-to-plate ...