We all have our mental or even physical check-lists for preparing print files and hopefully you use a true preflight software to help with that process. (Preflighting is helpful for a print checklist or printable checklists). Here is a good check list, in this article titled, “Digital Prepress Checklist.” This one section of it, is what I wanted to highlight:

Design & Pre-Press Checklist:

• Do not use Publisher or Quark. Stick to Adobe Products.
• Remember, Photoshop is for photos. Illustrator is for illustrations. InDesign is for Page Layout.
• Do not enlarge images beyond 120% of original size when placing it in your document.
• Do not use images downloaded from Google. Read second sections of post.
• Do not use compression methods (i.e. LZW or JPEG) on placed images for output.
• Do not use RGB images whenever possible. Convert them to CMYK.

Source: http://www.printedbyerik.com/2009/11/digital-prepress-checklist/

Wow. Is this someone Adobe sponsors or did I miss the boat and is Quark no longer used by thousands and thousands of publishers and layout artists? In any event good tips for the rest and, we offer data conversion tools for ALL of the above. If it is in InDesign you need to be from a Quark or Microsoft Publisher file, then just check these tools out, including our newly released search and extraction tool for page layout content:

Q2ID (QuarkXPress to Adobe INDD file conversion)

PUB2ID (MS Publisher to InDesign conversion plugin)

ID2Q (InDesign to QuarkXPress – yes, lots of them still)

PageZephyr (Index, search, edit and extract Quark and Adobe formats)

Lastly, FlightCheck Professional is a perfect tool to help you preflight check for many of the items from Erik’s prepress and designing for print check lists…

Tags: Digital Prepress Checklist, flightcheck professional, Page Layout, preflight, preparing print files, prepress checkist, print check lists, print checklist, print checklists, printable checklists

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 9:03 am and is filed under Markzware News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.