The site for prepress & print devotees

Prepressure covers design techniques, PDF, PostScript, fonts, JDF and numerous other prepress topics that have to do with printed communication and graphic arts. This site teams up with B4Print.com, the favorite stake-out of many prepress professionals who regularly visit its forums.

Bored by Benny

Spending ten days at drupa was more than enough. While watching the presentation at Landa I noticed that I wasn’t the only one who suffered from drupa-fatigue. While the dancers, Benny Landa’s speech and all the fancy Nanoink animations were the highlight of the 2012 show, having to watch it all over and over again is simply too much for anyone.

Prepress Pete is tweeting

Slowly recovering from telling the guy operating the STAHL that a folder is ‘a person who neatly folds toilet paper before cleaning himself’

Some quiet weeks ahead

It is a drupa year and much of my spare time is spent preparing for the show. This site will have to wait a bit. Regular updates should return somewhere in the second half of May (unless of course I eat a ‘Killer Bratwurst’ and never quite recover from the experience).

Archiving prepress files

A recent virus attack forced me to reformat one of the disks of my home PC. I had decent back-ups but it was a good reminder about the importance of backing up data as well as archiving important files. That topic also turned up in a recent discussion on archiving in the PrintPlanet forums. It seemed like a good idea to dedicate a separate page on this site to the best practices for archiving prepress data.

The poll: Which imposition software do you use?

This poll ran for several months because preparations for the drupa 2012 trade show kept me busy elsewhere.

New terms in the dictionary

Weeding – The process of removing excess vinyl on peel-and-stick vinyl stickers.
Adshel – A poster that is integrated into the structure of a bus shelter.
FSC and PEFC – Certificates which guarantee that the wood pulp used to produce paper is from sustainably managed forests.
E-13B font – E13B is a font that is optimized for magnetic ink character recognition (MIRC), a technique used in the banking industry for processing cheques.
Split run – A print job with one single frontside but two or more different backsides
Squeegee – In the screen printing process a squeegee is a blade of rubber set on a handle and used for pushing ink through the mesh. In lithography a squeegee is used to distribute ink as well but then it can also refer to a small roller.

What’s new?

New or reworked pages on 2011, a site update, printing in the 18th century, Lorem ipsum,  photochrome prints, selecting a prepress workflow, flocking, endcidrange, PDF/VT, image resolution, XP fonts, Fourneau Saint-Michel, photographing stuff, the Selexyz book store, the adoption rate of QR codes, Apple Color Emoji, OS X 10.7 font management, creating qr codes, quire, press checks, dot gain and dot loss, PDF metadata, STE boxes, QR codes and various dictionary terms.

Also have a look at

- B4Print - the prepress forum for people who like going off-topic once in a while.
- Quality In Print – Gordo’s guidelines to achieve better quality in print.
- InDesignSecrets – The podcasts are even better than the site.

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