Supplying an Adobe .pdf is the easiest way for us to print your work and providing the file has been saved appropriately, the whole process should be trouble free.
The .pdf files our clients supply fall into two main criteria: ‘Print’ or ‘Press’ all of which need to be saved/exported at the highest resolution possible to ensure they print correctly and appear crisp.
Files for ‘print’ relates to standard size documents intended to be digitally printed such as A4 letters, leaflets, reports and any other text-heavy publications that are generated in programs such as Microsoft Word or Publisher. In most cases, these files don’t have any of the printed image going over the edge of the page and do not need to be supplied with ‘crop marks’ and ‘bleeds’ as these sized documents are accurately produced straight onto A5, A4 and A3 sized stock by our digital printing technology.
PRESS
Files for ‘press’ relates to standard and non-standard sized documents intended to be litho’ printed. Artwork must be tagged to the appropriate spot colour(s) or for full colour process printing (cmyk). Regardless of whether these document have image running off one or more edges, these .pdf files must be supplied with ‘crop marks’ and ‘bleeds’ to ensure the printed image goes right to the trimmed edge of the stock.
Artwork usually intended for lithographic printing with spot colours includes business cards and corporate stationery as well as high-volume print runs on any item.
Pagination [aka page order]
When suppling artwork for a booklet, our imposition software takes care of arranging the pages in the correct order so please ensure your supplied .pdf files are single pages running from the front cover to the back.
Our studio uses Adobe InDesign as our primary print vehicle and gladly accept .indd or .idml files. Please ensure you run a preflight check of your document(s) using the ‘package’ function which is the best way to make sure you collect up all the files associated with your document. The resulting folder will contain both an .indd and .idml file along with a .pdf proof of your document(s) and all of the associated images/graphics and fonts.
To avoid sending any fonts, you may choose to convert all of your documents’ text to ‘outlines’. This makes processing your files quicker and easier – however, we strongly advise you to make a back-up of your original/editable document(s) before converting fonts to outlines.
Our studio uses Adobe Illustrator and gladly accept any of it’s file formats. Please ensure you run a preflight check of your document(s) using the ‘package’ function to make sure we receive everything we need to correctly print your document(s).
To avoid sending any fonts, you may choose to convert all of your documents’ text to ‘outlines’. This makes processing your files quicker and easier – however, we strongly advise you to make a back-up of your original/editable document(s) before converting fonts to outlines.
We can accept most raster file formats that will open with Adobe Photoshop. If you are intending to supply ‘layered’ Photoshop document, we strongly advise you to back-up your original file then flatten a version to send to us for printing. Please ensure all image files are set to CMYK. We also accept large Photoshop documents (.psb)
The .afdesign file extension is the native file format of Serif’s Affinity Designer — a welcomed newcomer to the vector graphics sector. It can open and export .pdf, .psd and .ai files as well as .eps and .svg files.
We can accept [your] .dwg files for printing technical drawings / building plans up to A0 size sheets and as long as 30 feet in black and white or greyscale. We can also print full colour posters, banners and any large format work on a variety of materials.
We accept Microsoft Office documents but please consider supplying a high quality .pdf to ensure what you send us is exactly what we print.
If you cannot provide a high quality .pdf from Quark XPress for any reason, we can accept Quark files but we no longer use the application itself. We open all supplied .qxp [or older .qxd] files using a third party Adobe InDesign conversion plug-in.
We advise you to carry out a preflight check of your document using the ‘Collect for Output’ function. Please ensure you always provide a low-resolution Acrobat .pdf proof when sending files so we have a quick visual reference of what we are printing.
We can still accept FreeHand MX files up to v11/MX generated on Macs using OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard). We advise you to carry out a preflight check of your document using the ‘Collect for Output’ function.
Please note: Freehand is no longer supported by Adobe following their acquisition of Macromedia and as such, we cannot rely on the integrity of the files FreeHand can export for more complex artwork projects. It is generally advised to export your Freehand documents to an Adobe Illustrator file format and, where possible, open the resulting file(s) in Illustrator before re-saving them as native .ai files. This will avoid any unexpected results once printed.
If you're unable to provide a high quality .pdf from your Adobe PageMaker file(s) for any reason, at the time of writing this, we can still accept PageMaker 7.0 documents from clients still running the MacOS 9 or WindowsXP versions. We no longer use PageMaker and open all supplied files with Adobe InDesign which works seamlessly in most cases but is not always guaranteed. Please ensure you can at least provide a low-res .pdf proof of your document(s) to give us a visual reference point to ensure what you send us is what we print.
See further information about common and proprietary file types.