Comprehensive checklist before printing?

Hi

Please could someone kindly point me to the most comprehensive check list for printing from XDP15. I want to make sure I am not missing something. It is new to me. I have used Xara only for web design until now, doing DTP in Quark, which I can no longer afford. I don't do enough print to justify it, pardon the DTP pun!

Having a very bad time. This should be a simple brochure, and I am still working on it, with no end in sight. Last night I needed to send samples to the client. I was supposed to be finished, but have only done half, because of baseline woes. High quality pdf produced the worst result. Pro print the second worst. The only one I dared send was the version for email, which was passable, but which refused to print one graphic - even when it was exported as a bitmap.

Seem to be doing nothing but workarounds, but happy to do more if I can get rid of this job.

Many thanks in advance.

Ali

If you do a browser search for something like 'Pre-flight checklist for printing', you'll probably get some ideas.

Topics generally include:

• File formats
• Support files
• Colour
• Image resolution
• Layout including bleeds, margins and cropmarks
• Fonts
• Spellchecking
• PDF settings

Any such pdf help really begins with the print service. What output profile do they want? Likely this will be printed using digital equipment as opposed to offset. But what type of equipment will make a difference.

And...as regards the bitmap, it would help to see the file. In lieu of that, make a bitmap copy in your Xara application and see if it outputs.

Hello,

Of course. But I am way behind and it is quicker to struggle on than stop and take screenshots etc. I have a very bad-looking document, at the moment, and I need to fix it.

I am tackling it by immediately altering anything that seems to be annoying Xara. I don't have time to persuade it any more. Bolding anything wrecks baselines, for example. But I have given up worrying. Now I am making sure everything is actually finished, at which point, at 1000% zoom, I will just bite it, and work through the individual lines that need their leading tweaked. I can do it in a 20 page brochure. It's a pain but doable. Couldn't do it in a book - not without going insane.

ANYWAY, on my travels, I found an interesting film on youtube that seemed to help, even if it didnt solve my particular problems. It makes full justification a lot easier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w-BCRIFSlE

Thanks to all who tried to help me. I took out the image Xara didn't like. No time. Spent the day and the doctors for my son.

Fingers crossed.

Web design is so much more forgiving!


Ali

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mwenz

Any such pdf help really begins with the print service. What output profile do they want? Likely this will be printed using digital equipment as opposed to offset. But what type of equipment will make a difference.

And...as regards the bitmap, it would help to see the file. In lieu of that, make a bitmap copy in your Xara application and see if it outputs.

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I agree with knowing what kind of printing will be done with the brochure. If they're simply going to take it to kinko's/fedex type of place and just flip the file into glorified Xerox machine, then you can definitely just create mega high resolution bitmaps for each page of a PDF. It makes a large file, but there's nothing from that kind of printing that requires things like crop marks, etc. In my experience the only thing that needs to be accounted for is when you talk to the person, make sure that their software doesn't 'auto fit'/'auto scale' your images of the pages.

If you're taking it to offset, then there's really not a lot you can do other than spit out a file from Xara that works in software that has more offset printing options and make adjustments there. I've gotten lucky in that my wife uses Adobe products (blech!) and so for those kinds of jobs, I do a majority of work in Xara for ease of use then spend an hour or two making fine adjustments in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop to get it ready for the client.

As well, another option is to simply purchase an older program at a cheap cost and eschew the 'always updating' model altogether as these models don't actually offer anything that cannot be done with older software; Word95 doesn't make any better documents than Word2010 despite what the developers would have you believe...although I would recommend against using Windows95 altogether :p

At any rate, look outside the box for solutions and they exist. Many times, we as consumers have bought onto upgrades that broke our stability and ability to do our work and many of us are finding out the hard way what we've already lost, but that doesn't mean we can't get it right back through eBay or abandonware sites. While this doesn't solve your immediate problems, it will hopefully get you in a place in between projects where this won't be an issue. One of the tricks that software companies do, however, is change file formats to force upgrades, so in that case, if someone sends you a file made with a newer version of a piece of software you're using, it won't load or will be corrupted in some way. The upside is that better software will output 'compatibility' files. EPS is a good example as that format really hasn't changed in decades with the only downside being that various software supports it to varying degrees of accuracy, much like the HTML and webbrowsers; IE is notorious for not supporting anything correctly ever...it's just par for the course where businesses battling over our dollars costs us, the consumers and users, time and money.

I hope I don't sound too preachy or 'sorry but not sorry' or 'here's a non-solution solution' as I've had this argument (read: discussion!) with my wife over these practices and business interests interfering with actual work that needs to be done on the user-side of things, but she contents that 'I don't want to learn anything else!' and to that I always say, "And that's how they beat you."

Peace and I hope your problem gets sorted out.

Hi,

I should have been more specific. I meant in Xara, because I wasn’t sure exactly what Xara did on publish, and what the printer still needed to do. But I found what I wanted in the manual! Shouldn’t try to speed read!

I love Xara DP, and it is easy to forgive its shortcomings, which are few. However, it would be very impractical to be setting baseline grids by hand on very long documents. The attach text to curve is a very handy workaround, and helps a lot.

I’m a very experienced user AND a very lazy user. I don’t look for a feature until I need a feature. Have been a web designer since 1995. This is the first time I’ve needed professional DTP from it. I used to use Quark, but stopped upgrading because I preferred designing webs, and web graphics.

Agree totally re. using bits of many programs. I can’t use ugly programs, so work in ones that make me happy, and keep older versions of others, as do you, to do the tougher tasks. I don’t bother now, but used to finish printed docs in Photoshop, and during the years working in NetObjects Fusion, kept Dreamweaver to do the odd thing Fusion really hated. I still keep Photoimpact because it is good at batch processing graphics. I still plan every web site in Fusion, and many other things, because its site view makes a great mindmap tool, and the structure is printable.

This was never supposed to be a printed document, so I’ve had to make it twice. Annoying. But hey, now I know Xara as a DTP program. Learning is never wasted.

Thanks to all who responded. You’re Xara’s greatest asset, really.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Artyboots

Hello,

Of course. But I am way behind and it is quicker to struggle on than stop and take screenshots etc. I have a very bad-looking document, at the moment, and I need to fix it.

I am tackling it by immediately altering anything that seems to be annoying Xara. I don't have time to persuade it any more. Bolding anything wrecks baselines, for example. But I have given up worrying. Now I am making sure everything is actually finished, at which point, at 1000% zoom, I will just bite it, and work through the individual lines that need their leading tweaked. I can do it in a 20 page brochure. It's a pain but doable. Couldn't do it in a book - not without going insane.

ANYWAY, on my travels, I found an interesting film on youtube that seemed to help, even if it didnt solve my particular problems. It makes full justification a lot easier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w-BCRIFSlE

Thanks to all who tried to help me. I took out the image Xara didn't like. No time. Spent the day and the doctors for my son.

Fingers crossed.

Web design is so much more forgiving!


Ali

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