Return to Assistance contents page Assistance - preparing digital artwork What software should I use? The "industry standard" for creating artwork for print is Quark Xpress. 95% of the work supplied to us digitally comes in the form of a Quark document. Other page layout applications which are equally acceptable include Adobe PageMaker and Adobe InDesign. Additionally, some particularly intricate pieces of artwork are more easily created in Macromedia FreeHand, and we are happy to output FreeHand documents directly. Is Microsoft Word/CorelDraw/Powerpoint/Microsoft Publisher okay? Most "office-orientated" software such as this is not designed for use in a commercial print environment. If your document has already been created in one of these packages, we can usually still work with it. However it will require more time in our prepress department (increasing the cost of your job), and will not produce results of the quality achieved by PostScript applications such as Quark Xpress. Therefore we strongly recommend that you switch to Quark Xpress, PageMaker or InDesign for general page layout, and use PostScript drawing applications like Illustrator or FreeHand for creating graphics and illustrations. Are scans from our scanner good enough to use in our documents? That depends on the scanner you have, how proficient the scanner operator is, and what kind of result you class as "good enough". Most desktop scanners costing typically £1500 or less produce colour scans of noticeably poorer quality than professional (and considerably more expensive) scanners such as those we use at AF. However, in the hands of a good operator, and given good originals, a budget desktop scanner can give acceptable results. You are welcome of course to use your scans to indicate "position". We can then replace your images with new high quality scans created in our prepress department. This is a very common method of working which enables you to experiment with your design without worrying about technical issues, safe in the knowledge that the end result will be of the highest standard. I know most designers use Macs, but we're using a PC. Is that okay? Yes. In common with virtually all printers, we run a Macintosh-based prepress system. However, the primary applications such as Quark and PageMaker are largely "file-compatible" across the Mac and PC platforms. This means that we can open your PC Quark or PageMaker file on our Macs. Very occasionally, small changes can occur in your document when it moves platforms, although these are usually associated more with differences in fonts than differences in the software itself. If you are using a PC to create your work it is important that you only use PostScript or TrueType fonts that have an exact equivalent on the Macintosh. This is not as restrictive as it might sound, as all the major font libraries have both Mac and PC versions of their fonts. It will help tremendously if you can tell us exactly which fonts from which manufacturer you have used. It is also important that you supply laser proofs of the job printed from your PC, to enable us to check for any differences that might have crept in. Though for that matter, it helps us tremendously if you supply laser proofs whatever kind of computer you're using. While we're on the subject of laser printers, we strongly recommend that you use a laser or inkjet printer that supports the PostScript page description language. Laser proofs of Quark or PageMaker documents printed on a non-PostScript printer will not provide an accurate representation of your artwork. Be aware that many printers sold for use with PCs are not PostScript-compatible, since the vast majority of PCs are not being used for professional graphics work. What file format should our graphics be in? There are various graphics file formats used in print publishing, but by far the most common are: EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) - used primarily for "vector" graphics, as created by Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) - used for scanned or "bitmap" images, as created by Adobe Photoshop and other "paint"-type graphics software. There is occasionally some overlap between the two. For instance, you can save a scanned image as an EPS file, which enables a few more specialised features. Or you may incorporate a TIFF image into an illustration created in FreeHand, which you subsequently save in EPS format. Graphics file formats that we suggest you avoid include Windows Meta File, GIF, PICT, and DXF. It is best to convert any such graphics to either TIFF or EPS as appropriate before using them in your page layout software. You may be able to import them into Quark or PageMaker as is, but results can be unsatisfactory or unpredictable when printed. How should we specify colours? All colours used in your documents should be specified either as CMYK process colours, or spot colours (ideally chosen from one of the Pantone colour libraries). You can use Pantone colour swatch books, or CMYK tint charts to see a reasonably accurate example of the colour when printed. Colours used in imported graphics must also be defined as either spot or process colours. Scanned colour images should be converted to CMYK before placing into your layout.