Sending a PDF File for Print? Wait

A lot of professional print jobs are sent as high-resolution PDF files to the press nowadays. We show you what all to check before you send them across

Thursday, August 09, 2007

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Nowadays PDF (Portable Document Format) files are quite common for viewing pages. Most of the magazines and newspapers send high resolution PDF files to press for printing. But there are certain checkpoints that need to be taken care of before sending them.

A PDF file is preferred over an EPS file or a Postscript file because its size is smaller . For instance a PostScript or an EPS file of a single page of a magazine with lots of images may take approximately 40-50 MB space, while PDF of the same page will take only 3-4 MB space. The best part about using a PDF file is that anybody can open it using the freely available Adobe Reader. Moreover, while using a PDF file, you don't have to worry about missing fonts, since all fonts are embedded within the PDF file. In addition, after opening a PDF file in Adobe Reader you can perform operations such as View, Share, Print, Crop, Add and Delete pages. You can transfer, open and view these PDF files on any operating system like PC or MAC without losing important data, fonts, style sheet or page formatting. Let's see what you should look at before sending a PDF for final printing.

Ready to RIP?
Files that are ready to be sent to press are called as being ready to RIP(Raster Image Process). The first thing that you should look for is undesirable white space outside the printing area. If a PDF file has too much of white space outside the printing area, then its size will be larger and one can also face problems while printing it. To get rid of this, you need to crop the file. To remove the additional white spaces, go to Tools >Advanced Editing >Crop tool. Then select the area you want to keep, press the Enter key and the undesirable white space area is removed.

After cropping the file if you need to measure the width and height of printable area, then select the measuring tool from Tools >Measuring >Distance Tool. This can also be used for measuring specific areas of a document such as a box, table or picture size, before the final PDF is sent for printing.

There are several instances when you need to insert or delete a few pages from a PDF file. To do so, open the PDF file, go to 'Document' menu, select 'Insert Pages' option and a new window will open up. In this window, select the file to be inserted within the existing PDF. After this selection, another window pops up, in which you can define where to insert new pages. You have two options, 'Before' and 'After.' Select the one you need and you will have two PDF files merged into a single one. Remember, there is no way to undo this page insertion process, so make sure you save a copy of the original PDF file. Apart from inserting pages, you can also add, delete and rotate the page clockwise or anti-clockwise.

Use the 'Crop tool' for removing the additional white space outside the printing area

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