How to Prepare Your File for Print: The Press Checklist

Getting a file press-ready isn't complicated once you know what a printer is looking for, but a handful of small things catch people out again and again, and any one of them can hold up a job or spoil the result. This checklist covers everything we need to print your flyers, business cards, booklets and other press work cleanly the first time.

It applies to our press products: flyers, business cards, booklets, postcards, folded leaflets, Premium A3 Art Prints, calendars, stickers, letterheads, compliment slips, loyalty cards, posters and the like. (Giclée fine art prints work differently, and have their own guide.)

The checklist at a glance

Size, bleed and safe zone

Set your document to the finished size, then add 3mm of bleed all the way round, and keep anything important (text, logos, prices) at least 4mm inside the trim in the safe zone. Bleed stops a white edge appearing if the cut shifts slightly, and the safe zone stops important content being trimmed too fine. If any of that is new, our guide to bleed and the safe zone explains it in full.

Resolution

Supply images at 300 ppi at their final size. Lower than that and photos start to look soft once printed. It's worth checking the effective resolution of any image you've scaled up, since enlarging a small file doesn't add detail that was never there.

Colour

Please supply artwork in CMYK, set to the Coated FOGRA39 profile. This is the colour standard our press works to, so it lets us predict how your colours will print. Anything supplied in RGB or with Pantone (spot) colours will be converted to CMYK, and bright RGB colours in particular can shift once converted, so it's always better to design in CMYK and see those colours from the start. Our guide to RGB and CMYK explains why.

File format

Export a print-ready PDF. Use PDF/X-4 if your software offers it, or High Quality Print if not. Both keep your transparencies and gradients intact for our RIP to handle, and both are safer than the older PDF/X-1a standard, which flattens transparency at export and can introduce faint lines and colour shifts. Include crop marks, and make sure they sit outside the bleed rather than over your artwork.

Fonts

Outline or embed all your fonts before exporting, so your type prints exactly as designed with no risk of substitution. Keep text no smaller than 5pt; below that, fine detail in the letterforms starts to lose definition on press.

Black

How you build black matters. For small text and fine detail, use 100% K only (plain black), because a black made from all four inks shows any tiny misregistration as a soft, fuzzy edge on small type. For large solid areas where you want a deeper, richer black, use a rich black instead. Any of these work well:

• Cool black: C40 M0 Y0 K100
• Warm black: C0 M40 Y0 K100
• Balanced black: C30 M30 Y30 K100

The rule of thumb: rich black for big blocks, plain 100% K for anything small.

Overprint

Don't set objects to overprint unless you know exactly why you're doing it. Overprint tells the press to print one colour directly on top of another instead of knocking it out, and it rarely does what people expect. The classic disaster is a white object set to overprint, which vanishes completely, since white "printed" over another colour simply shows the colour beneath. If in doubt, leave overprint off.

Lines and hairlines

Avoid hairlines. A hairline is a line defined as thinner than the press can reliably reproduce, and how thin that is depends on the device, so a line that looks fine on screen can print broken or disappear. Keep every line and rule to a minimum of 0.25pt.

Transparency and gradients

Don't flatten your transparencies or gradients. Exporting to PDF/X-4 or High Quality Print keeps them intact so our RIP can handle them at full output resolution, which is cleaner and more predictable than flattening them yourself at the design stage. If a design leans heavily on transparency or blend modes, it's worth a quick word with us before you export.

Booklets

For booklets, supply your artwork as single pages in reading order (page 1, page 2, page 3 and so on), not as reader spreads or imposed pages. We handle the imposition, so single pages let us arrange them correctly for folding and binding.

Before you send it

Whatever you're producing, it's always worth printing a hard copy to check the layout before sending it to us. If you have any doubts about bleed, colour or setup, talk to us first, email your files to info@saxonprint.com we can give advice and adjust files for a small fee, which can save the cost and delay of a job not coming out as you hoped.

When it's ready, send your print-ready PDF over and we'll check it before anything goes to press.