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.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on September 27, 2006
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