The truth is that in today’s market, file prep has become quite user friendly. In most cases, all a printer needs is a high resolution PDF with crops and bleeds. However, I always recommend that a client send the printer their working files as well - including all fonts and links.
Why you may ask? We will almost always work from your PDF, but unpredictable results still happen with files such as transparency issues, color alterations or in some cases the dreaded file corruption. Working files give your printer the ability to troubleshoot these issues and make the file work. Another great benefit of sending the working files is that we can make changes at the last minute. Even files that are looked over thousands of times before they are sent to print have typos or last minute revisions. Sending us the working files give us the opportunity to make these changes for you, which can speed up the production process. In today’s age, client expect rapid turn times, every second counts.
Should a file be stepped up or supplied in spreads of any kind? With today’s software, submitting files has become more simple than it used to be. Our equipments’ rip software’s can do more than ever before: from stepping a file up, building printer spreads, printing variable data, and building booklets. So in almost all cases you just need to send your file as single pages, sized with crops and bleeds, and we can do the rest on our end.
A lot of times clients are mistaken in thinking that stepping the file up on their end is saving us time or helping the production process. However, in most cases it either limits us from getting more out on a page (which in turn can give you a better price) or puts us in a position to redo the work so that we can get the file stepped up correctly for our machine and our paper restrictions/needs.
Struggling with a file? Contact KPB today at 513-681-4450!
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