New free templates | PDF's Rule! | Small Business | Gen Y | Budget Printing

Print Pelican: Printing Tech Tips

PDF Rules!

Here at Print Pelican, we encourage our customers to save PDFs for commercial print jobs. PDFs are one of the best delivery vehicles for commercial printing services. We think PDF rules.

Why? Well, for starters, PDF is compact. A PDF file that contains all the data needed to print your job at high resolution still weighs in at about 25% of the size of the collected page layout files, images and fonts that you would have to send us to achieve the same printed result.

A smaller file is a file that transfers faster over the internet, especially if you are using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) over a DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) internet connection from your home or small business. Such internet connections typically have much greater bandwidth for downloading than for uploading files. A typical upload throughput for home DSL is in the range of 2-to-5 MB per minute. A 200 MB package could therefore easily take more than an hour to upload. But the corresponding PDF file will transfer in about 15 minutes. You can upload the PDF file and still manage to pick up the kids from basketball practice on time.

Another reason why PDF rules is that it helps to eliminate potential problems due to the human tendency to forget things. We’re all busy and we face multiple tight deadlines every day, so it’s understandable that sometimes our print jobs go out with a missing image or font. With properly prepared PDF, all the images and fonts needed for high-resolution imaging are embedded in the file, so you can’t forget to send them.

You may have noticed the attractive design templates available on the Print Pelican web site. These templates are another way we use the PDF file format. After you enter your text and upload your images, a PDF engine operating in the background automatically generates a PDF proof and print file. This template-driven PDF file is virtually guaranteed to run on our system, and it contains all the text, fonts and images needed to print your job at high resolution.

Last-minute changes are easy with PDF files. At our printing facility, the PDF file you send us is the same file that we use to generate high-resolution rendered data for our CTP (Computer-to-Plate) workflow. Each page of your PDF is saved on our system as a separate, page-independent file. When you have last-minute changes, you don’t need to send the whole job again. You only need to send the changed pages, which we can incorporate into the job on our system without disturbing the good pages.

To make a long story short, PDF rules because it is a faster and more reliable vehicle for delivering jobs to the printer. But nothing is foolproof. PDF files have to be properly prepared for us to realize their potential benefits. In other words, for PDF to rule, there have to be some rules.

The first rule in preparing PDF files for commercial print (as opposed to preparing them for email or the web) is to use Acrobat Distiller as your PDF-generating engine. Acrobat Distiller is part of the Adobe Acrobat Standard and Professional software packages. Acrobat Standard is sometimes bundled with computer systems from Dell and other PC makers. Acrobat Distiller also comes as a freebie with Adobe PageMaker 7.0. Acrobat Standard and Professional can both be purchased online from the Adobe web site (http://www.adobe.com).

The first step in preparing a PDF file with Acrobat Distiller is to generate a PostScript file from your page layout or graphics program. The PostScript file is then processed through Acrobat Distiller to generate the final, print-ready PDF file. This method to save PDFs for commercial print is generally more reliable than using your program’s built-in Export-to-PDF or Save-As-PDF function. It’s also more reliable than using that “PDF Gizmo” freeware program you found on the internet.

In future, Print Pelican’s printing tech tips will explain in detail all the rules for generating reliable, print-ready PDF files from popular page-layout and graphics applications. In the meantime, if you have questions about creating PDF files for commercial print, or need immediate help setting up a PDF workflow on your system, please send Print Pelican an email at techtips@printpelican.com.

New free templates | PDF's Rule! | Small Business | Gen Y | Budget Printing