General DTP Tips
General DTP Tips
An often asked question is what RESOLUTION to set. Using a high resolution gives you nothing but a big file!
We recommend scanning at 1.5 times the screen ruling for B&W pics and 2 times for colour. Most modern scanning programs let you choose a resolution to scan to, and then set the scaling percentage for each individual scan. So if you have a number of photos to scan for a job all you need to is multiply the screen ruling by the 1.5 or 2 factor, set this resolution into the scanning program and adjust the scaling up or down for each scan. This way all your pics will come in to your page layout program at the right size and you won't have to push calculator buttons for each scan!
It has been known for a while that if the file size goes over 64K you can experience weird problems with windows. We have also noticed that if the number of installed ATM fonts goes over about 300 you get a similar attack of the gremlins!
Truetypes don't cause as much trouble but over 400 seems to be start of problems. The best advice is to run a lean number of fonts as much as possible - your system will run faster and crash less!
If you change the default screen ruling in the advanced settings box of the Postscript printer driver under Win 3, 3.1, 95 it will override and sometimes mess up all screen rulings set up at the output device - the best advice is to leave this setting well alone!
This method of moving graphics is not the best when final output is to be imageset, as the graphics are converted to Windows Metafiles which do not always reproduce well on an imagesetter. EPS files are a much more reliable way to move graphics between pages.
If you must cut & paste be sure that your default printer is set to be the final output device when you cut & paste as the graphics will change in weirdo ways when you change printers.
If you are having trouble with a photo losing detail in the shadow areas try scanning it in colour and then convert it to B&W. This works because the colour scan samples more information than the B&W scan, and the resulting image can contain a little more detail than the simple B&W scan.
If the artwork you are producing is going to be photocopied rather than printed you can still get good reproduction of photos. Scan them at a lower resolution and let us tell us that they are going to be copied and we will adjust the job at output time to give best results on a photocopier.
This is a very important point that many people get caught with or just forget - a line defined as a hairline (or often the thinnest line available in a package, even if not called this) will print at the thinnest weight possible on your output device. This means on a 300 or 600 DPI proof a thin line will print at the width of the laser printer's pixel which is quite large.
However when final output to neg or bromide is made the line will be a single width pixel at 1200 or 2400 DPI which is much too fine to reproduce on a printing plate.
Play it safe and set all lines to a specific width. Suggested absolute minimums are 0.3 point for neg/metal plate jobs and 0.4 point for bromide/paper plate jobs and 0.7 point for screen printing artwork.
The fastest way to redraw a logo in Corel Draw! or Freehand is to scan it and import as a TIFF image. Working over the top of the logo helps make sure you get text spacing and so on EXACTLY like the original. You can put the scan on a layer so it can be turned off for previews during development.
Remember to delete the scan once the job is complete to keep your file size down!
If you happen to own an old 300DPI HP Scanjet scanner you probably don't know you can use the software to give it an instant "upgrade" to 600DPI - go to the options menu of Accuscan select Settings and under Resolution type 600 in the Horiz and Vert boxes, label it 600DPI - you just upgraded your scanner. In fact this uses software interpolation techniques and does not upgrade the optical resolution - but sure gives you a lot better scan!
On the subject of scanning and logos if you have to reproduce a small logo from a business card or similar enlarge it on the photocopier before scanning - you get a much lower dose of the jaggies. In extreme cases bring it in to TT we'll enlarge 4 or 500% on the process camera!.
The point system of measurement is the natural one for measuring text, but it can be difficult for new users to get used to. It is very tempting especially for ex-CAD users to work in millimeters but it is not recommended. Do persevere with the points because you will get used to it and it will make life a lot easier as you approach the echelons of prepress desktop and want to look professional when dealing with printers.
Don't anyone laugh, we all need to learn once! I recently caught a brilliant and very experienced graphic artist new to computers hand drawing the lines on a form he had typeset with Pagemaker because "Pagemaker can't get them straight"
To get straight lines in almost all windows packages is done by holding either the shift or control key (experiment!) This also applies to resizing graphics in many packages the shift or control key will lock a graphic to its correct proportions (on many packages it will fix it even if you previously distorted it!)
This applies to virtually every package in existence. If you Save As rather than Save the internal structure of your document will be "rebuilt" from scratch, cleaning up internal copies of deleted items etc and resulting in a smaller file.
Some programs such as Pagemaker allow you to set an option in preferences to save faster (i.e."save") or slower ("save as") each time you save, to ensure you always have compact files
If you are designing a job that will be printed on porous stock with paper plates and the job contains both photos and tint panels you will find that the screen ruling needed to stop the photos filling in in dark areas (65-85 lpi depending upon the stock being used) may look a bit course for the tint panels. As long as your tints are between 15 and 30% you can probably have a finer screen in the tint panels giving your job a better overall look.
To achieve this in CorelDraw! you must lock your tint panels at the higher screen ruling using the Postscript Options box for each individual panel. We will then imageset the job at the lower ruling for the photos, but the panels will remain locked at the higher ruling.
In Pagemaker a different method is required, as the tint panels cannot be locked, but the imported photos can, so set each of them to the lower screen ruling using the image control options, and we will imageset the job using the higher screen ruling required for the panels.
Your printer is the best person to advise on the screen rulings to use for the stock you have chosen and his equipment. If he doesn't know use the values mentioned above and see how it goes!
If you use template files for frequently accessed files such as blank business card 4 up, flyers or whatever, or have particular graphic files that you import frequently you can save a lot of time scrolling up and down filename menus looking for them.
Renaming them so that the first character is a "-" (minus sign) will ensure they always appear at the top of the available items file list! (PS this does not work with Windows 95!)
You know those dots that get used for expression in a paragraph...they have a name. Called an "ellipsis" it is actually a character in it's own right (Alt-193 in VP GEM, check the manual for other packages). If your package doesn't support it use three full stops even though the spacing will be slightly different.
But remember THREE dots, no more and no less and definitely no full stop after the event.
A terrific resource to have on hand is the "Style Manual for Authors and Editors" put together by the Australian Government Publishing Service. Saves arguments over punctuation, short forms etc. Look for a copy in a big bookshop.
Another handy reference while typesetting is a Spelling Guide, It's heaps faster than a dictionary because it doesn't have definitions, just the words and every extra ending shown too! They also have little spots between the letters to show where you can legally hyphenate. Published by Macquarie and probably others.A left hander here asked if our next print run of docket books could be perfed at the top rather than down the left hand side as he has trouble writing in them and tearing the pages out. Obvious when you think about it!
BE CAREFUL! If you get wax on a laser print it will lift off the toner. Always put a clean sheet of paper underneath when waxing. Use old proofs face down.
A Syquest cartridge is like any other hard disk, it needs to be formatted and partitioned. Use SQATPREP for IDE drives and SQPREP for SCSI drives. Recent shipments of cartridges have been Mac formatted which will stop you using them until they have been reformatted for DOS.
If you use a number of downloadable Postscript fonts in a document, print times can get incredibly slow...
To speed things up you can use a utility such as PSDOWN or PCSEND to pre-download the fonts to your Postscript laser printer, then tell the computer that the fonts are resident.
You need to do it again whenever the printer is turned off, and it takes a few minutes, but if you have a five page document with say three downloadables on each page it will save a lot of time.
PKZIP's spanned archive feature compresses a file over as many floppy disks as is necessary.
The syntax to do this is not easy to remember so here is a sample command line to compress a CorelDraw! file in a directory on c: drive onto multiple floppies in a: drive.
PKZIP -ex -& a:zipfile c:\corel5\draw\yourfile.cdr
You will need a recent version of PKZIP as earlier versions don't have the multi floppy spanning option.
