My adventures in online postcard printing (or why the shoemaker’s children run barefoot).
I’m doing some of the publicity for my seminar in New York and Seattle and I thought it would be nice to have some postcard-size handouts. I could mail the cards to friends as well as distribute them at the New York InDesign User Group meeting in October. Very reasonable, yes? Well here’s my disaster story.
I started by going online and finding what looked like a pretty good shop. (Names are being withheld to avoid lawsuits.) They use a “state-of-the-art” digital printing press, but I wasn’t worried. Digital wouldn’t be so bad for this job and it allowed me to order a very small quantity.
I sent them out a PDF from my InDesign layout, and quick as a bunny, the postcards came back. Sadly, they were awful. Outside of a rich black background that had turned to grey mud, the were horribly trimmed with all sorts of ugly things sticking to the edges of each card. The ink was blotchy. And worse, all the text looked off-register.
On inspection of the document with a loop, I saw all the text and strokes were fuzzy. It looked like someone had taken my PDF and rasterized it in Photoshop.
I called the outfit and told them how disappointed I was. The woman said she’d send my comments to their technical staff which would get back to me.
I then decided to try a slightly more expensive place. I had never done any work with them, but knew people who did. I sent them my PDF.
Very quickly I got a phone call. There was something wrong with my PDF. Wrong? Moi PDF? How could that be? I am so perfect??? But as soon as the fellow described the areas of problems, I knew he was right.
I had committed the worst-possible sin in all of ID creation. I had put text below the area of a transparent Photoshop document. Oh the shame! Oh the humiliation.
I told the guy that I would send him a new PDF as soon as possible. But he didn’t quite trust me anymore. He asked for the ID files as well as the PDF. I said I would do it.
Back at my computer, I opened the ID file and fixed the errant text area. I then decided that I would send the guy a PDFx-compliant file. There would not be one damn thing wrong with the file! I exported the file according to the PDFx specifications and then opened it in Acrobat to run the Preflight report. I was horrified to see dozens of nasty error messages, mostly about strokes that were scaled down too small. Some even accused me of stroking with the color registration.
How could I have done that? Where were these errors coming from? It took a lot of sleuthing, but I finally found the problem. I had inserted a PDF of my book cover Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2 (co-authored with Steve Werner). But the PDF was the live elements PDF that had been created in Illustrator. Instead of rasters, all the fills, strokes, and text outlines were live.
Scaled down to 10%, no wonder I was getting all those error messages.
So, I fixed the PDF, and then sent the new, and perfectly-compliant PDF to the shop.
Not too long after, I got the “proof” of the job — another PDF! What confused me was that the background color wasn’t all one color. Part was my original rich black formula of (40, 20, 5, 100), but another part was much darker (60, 40, 20, 100). Where did THAT come from?
I called the print shop and asked about the colors. Turns out that someone had changed my rich black to a different formula that they use for their jobs!
How dare they! But instead of screaming, I explained to the guy that I had specifically chosen my formula so that an image that had a darker black, would pop out from the background.
“Oh…”, said the guy. “It sounds like you knew what you were doing! We’ll fix it!”
Around that time I got a call from the original digital printing shop. The woman listened to my comments. I explained how I had checked the file using the loupe and suspected that they had opened the PDf in Photoshop. “Oh, you know we’re a digital press. If you’re using words like loupe and Photoshop, it sounds like you should go to an offset print shop.”
Wow! You know we’re in trouble when the words loupe and Photoshop are too advanced for a digital press.
I have worked a lot with designing post cards for many clients and myself. The majority of them being mail outs for companies and the rest are post card invitations for art exhibits. I have always gone with http://www.modernpostcards.com. They do a great job and offer you access to thier “Color Kit” which contains ICC Printer Profiles and instructions to help you calibrate your monitor and convert your digital files to better match the output of 4-color press. They also offer size templates (unless you are working on a custom sized job) and Adobe, QuarkXpress, or Macromedia Save or Export settings. They have an excellent turn around time (5 business days). Or you can expedite it for a fee of course. I hope they aren’t the people you had a bad run in with, but I seriously doubt it. I encourage any one who doesn’t already have a prefered printer to check them out.
PS Love the site!
I want to argue (just because I’m in that kind of mood) about this “never put text below Photoshop transparency” thing. You know, this really shouldn’t be a problem on anything except low-res (below 1200 dpi) output devices.
InDesign handles text under transparency in a perfectly reasonable way when it needs to flatten it: It turns that text into clipping paths. But when some text is “real text” and some has been converted to outlines (for the clipping paths), then you’ll notice the difference on low-res devices. However, you should not see much (if any) difference on a high res device!
The biggest problem is that some rips (such as the ol’ Brisque) just can’t deal with text converted to clipping paths very well. It spazzes and rasterizes all the text to the CT layer, as though the text were an image… It’s incredibly stupid, but it’s the RIP problem, not InDesign’s. I wonder what kind of RIP your “service” provider was using.
–david blatner
Oh, David’s getting feisty in his old age.
I agree that InDesign isn’t doing anything that “wrong” in converting the text to outlines.
But there is one more element to this situation that could be why the RIP is spazzing out.
InDesign doesn’t just convert the text to outlines. Perhaps if that was all it did, things would be just hunky dory.
InDesign keeps a copy of the original text behind the text that has been converted to outlines. This is so Acrobat can still find the text in the document “Find” box.
It is probably confusing for the RIP to have exactly the same stuff right on top of itself. (OK, maybe the RIP shouldn’t get confused by this, but I would.)
Hey Sandee.. What a story!
It make me smile a lot.
Next time you need a small print run, give me a call.
Actually, when text is converted to outlines, that isn’t much of a good thing at all. At least in some cases.
Ever notice that type seems to get bold when you convert it to outlines? Ever wonder why that is? Believe it or not, RIPs use different rules when processing vector PATHS and TEXT objects.
See this post on my blog for detailed information:
http://rwillustrator.blogspot.com/2006/01/typblography.html
Oh, and I can vouch for printing with JC — I’ve used him and have had only the most pleasant of experiences.
Regarding text getting bolder when printing. I have seen this a lot and for digital printing it can be pretty visible since the rips for digital printing is mostly between 600 and 1200 for most of them.
I have had very good results with Postcard Press (www.postcardpress.com). Their prices were much cheaper than Modern Postcard last I checked. I have done about 10 projects with them. As an old-timer I am still afraid of sending PDFs but I send them anyway and have had good results. Adobe Acrobat and PDF format is one of the great inventions of our time.
I can vouch for sometimes changing file colors. At Magnetstreet, we are always changing rich black on our IGEN because anything buy K=100 alone will be grey, it prints CMY on top of the K so CMYK=100 comes out rather grey. We always call our customers and let them know what we are doing and find out exactly what they are looking for. No one wants reprints. At 600dpi we do look out for rendered type, especially partially rendered type. yuck! But the IGEN does a pretty good job on our postcards and fridge magnets. We have digital presses and we use words like loupe and I even have Photoshop on my computer! Check us out at http://www.magnetstreet.com
cheers,
Bob
I know this thread is a little old but I’d like to comment about the text behind a tansparency problem. Perhaps you have solved this already. I work in the prepress dep of a printshop in VA, and we deal with many clients each using different design software. ID is one of them, and we have noticed that if you change the layer order so that the text is on top, or change the blending options to normal, then the file will rip just fine.
Now for my two cents. The one word that really sticks out is “export” (the dirty word of printing). I’m in prepress, and this is based on experience. My employer got a direct to metal plate maker. It has a RIP that supports a pdf workflow. I got a PDF from one of the customers, a small hand bill, I had to set it 10 up as a work and roll. I made the mistake of exporting the pdf file and sending it to the RIP. This is the most bizarre thing I had ever seen, the two sets of files on the left were right, and the other three sets on the right changed in the plate making process. Text characters piled up on top of each other. I was beside myself. I sent a copy of the file to tech support, and either they’re still working on it, or they don’t have an answer.
I went back to the impositioned file, and took a different route. I printed to a PS file, ran it through distiller, and sent that PDF file to the RIP. I must have spent 15 minutes on the RIP preview to make sure the file was right before making plates.
Since then, exporting to PDF is for PDF Proofs, printing to PS and distilling is for press.
As far as text under a transparency, I’d suggest using the Separation Preview to see if it’s going to be a problem with the color output. Only if the Photoshop image had a blending mode, there might be an issue. When transparency is used to screen back an image, or object, it can change the output of text or objects below it. Just don’t forget about setting “Overprint” options on the preview palette, or in the native graphic application, such as AI (I think PS assume everything overprints).
In addition, the Attributes palette from InDesign sets the attributes from within the application.
I had a different problem (hope I’m allowed to digress here) - I found a brilliant online postcard store, my cards came back perfect ! My problem is when I try to print the addresses and details on the back the ink smudges ! Try laying out 1500 postcards individually to dry ! (25 mins min.) - can someone tell me how I solve this problem (have 8000 postcards left and I’m worn out catching each indiv. one - my printer is an inkjet ! Can anyone help me !
Oops, one more thing - the front of my cards are glossy, the back is satin finish - which I guess is the problem.
Help somebody !
Jools,
Yes, the finish is the problem.
You’d be better off printing your information on small labels and sticking them on the back of the cards.
Much easier and they won’t smudge.
Thanks Vector, that seems to be my only option - except I left a blank area on the back of the card to put updated info on
(I’m a realtor) - someone suggested I get a laser printer - however, the ones I’ve investigated you have to individually hand feed the cards one at a time - any other ideas ?
How do others deal with this problem I wonder? 8,000 cards for $250 was just too tempting I guess
The printer tells me satin is the only finish they do, that or high gloss, thank goodness I went with satin…
We always use address and mail houses for sending postcards and mailings. They print the mailing address on the mail piece or postcard, and postage in bulk is a better rate than doing it yourself- not to mention the time they save. Write us and we will give you a great mail house resource we use.
How do we get ahold of you Jean-Claude Tremblay?