Sunday, February 7, 2010

A Super Feature in Microsoft Publisher

More and more of our customers are using Microsoft Publisher. We happily accept those files! We would much rather see Publisher files than documents created in a word processor (i.e., Word or WordPerfect) or even worse, a presentation style program. We charge a fee for accepting these latter files.

But I am getting off point. I wanted to clue everyone into the Design Checker tool that resides under the Tools menu in Publisher. This little gem will help you avoid 95% of your problems when you take your file to ANY printer.

As you can see from the sample on the right, there are several types of checks you can run. I am mainly interested in the first 2.

"General Design Checks" will show you such problems as items outside the print area, overlapping items, hidden items, and even hidden text. But I am more interested in the commercial printing area.

Both checks inform you of many errors that are problematic for printers. The main errors we see are incorrect color spaces (RGB instead of CMYK or spot colors), poor graphics (i.e., "low resolution picture" which is under 150 dpi), or a transparency error.

The color space errors are worthy of several separate discussions. But depending on how your project is to be printed, RGB might be acceptable.

Picture resolution should ideally be 300 - 1200 dpi. Unfortunately, we often receive items that were copied from the web - those are always 72 dpi and just do not print correctly. At best they look blurry. And if they are scaled to a larger size, they get a seriously bad case of the "jaggies".

A transparency error is a little more suble. But it will not print correctly when processed through our equipment. This occurs because you selected a color and then used the "Transparency" section in the color menus. This is great for the web - but doesn't always turn out like you expect in printing. It may turn our okay at home, but when we send it through our postscript processors, there is no telling how it will come out. Sometimes it is solid, sometimes its a different color, and sometimes it just dissappears.

These are just a few of the most commor errors, but each item that is listed must be reviewed. As long as you understand the consequences of the design error, you may want to ignore it. However, it ALWAYS helps us produce the result you want if you fix all the issues found by the Design Checker.