Quote:
Originally Posted by Jezza
The easiest answer is to supply untrapped 'generic' HiRes pdfs and let the printer worry about their settings.
The way things are, seems to be the printers being overly helpful, trying to make their life easier and save you some money - no tinkering at their end.
However, this clearly isn't happening. It's possible that they have differing profiles for different presses and different stock - coated/uncoated for example.
If you can get a settings instruction on the job ticket then that would be helpful, though I fear it's unlikely.
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I only wish it's this easy... I'm already told most of our domestic printers will not work with our files if they are submitted wrong. So a generic hires PDF likely wont work for all of our printers, if preflight fail on their automatic system, we get an automatic kickback. It's more time wasted if this is an oversea printer.
I also doubt the printers are trying to save us money. One printer's website was still using Quark 4-5 PDF settings when we recently made the jump to Quark 7 (we still have 6.5). Screenshots that were suppose to help me setup to their specs are completely different and off.
Another reason why a generic hi-res PDF won't work is that I already have one printer asking us to set trapping/overprint for them. I had to re-submit the same PDFs multiple times because they can't seem to add trim marks on their own. They can't set trapping from their system. Which makes me wonder how many more of our printers shares the same technical problems.
I like your idea of putting PDF setting instruction on a job ticket/per project. However it's still not too practical nor efficient at this point. Regardless, I still need to instruct our art dept of 6 + freelancers to use all the varies settings. I can just see heads roll when I start showing them all the stuffs I have been trying to setup.
Just a day ago, one designer was asking me why we need to resize an image that was scaled to 20% in the layout. My simple answer was "it's inefficient to have printers process something that was only used 20%". I don't think he fully understood why it's his problem to setup his file correctly and efficiently. Old school designers still think it's printers responsibility to make things work and look pretty for them.
This bring me back to PDF workflow... end user errors, shipping out wrong PDFs to printers and receiving kickbacks is something we need to avoid at all cost. High expectations with no easy answer right now. I have a feeling any outgoing PDFs to printers will have to funnel through me eventually. I can't see my boss agreeing to have art dept doing it. Honestly, neither can I right now.
