Spot Colours in MS Publisher

How do you get spot colours RIGHT in Publisher 3, 95 or 97?

The key to setting up your publication to use spot colours (black and one or two spot colours) is to carry out the outside printer setup command. You can do this at any time, but you won't be able to set any spot colours effects until you have done it.

Choose the option that says spot colours at greater than 1200 dpi resolution, and then check the appropriate options for overprinting of black lines and fills and text (you probably want these both turned on), in the next screen choose Microsoft Publisher Imagesetter as the outside printer driver and enable the boxes controlling extra paper sizes and showing of crop marks.

Once this is done you will see all the colour graphics in your publications transformed to shades of grey to show how they will actually print. You can now apply the spot colours to various objects in your publication. Avoid using the "patterns", stick to tints or gradients from one colour to a tint of the same colour or white.

The same rules apply to Publisher as any other program when choosing line weights, do not use hairlines as they will be too thin to print, use a minimum of a 0.4 point line.

Avoid the temptation to use the shadows effect as it does not always print well, if you must have a shadow draw a second copy of the object and tint it.

You can create interesting effects by setting the frame background colours of imported graphics to tints or gradients.