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.

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).

Prepress Pete is tweeting

Our website now proudly lists all the presses we have. Good luck trying to find on their sites which forging presses Ford or GM use!

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.

Best wishes!

May 2012 be a smooth ride for you – in good health, with lots of work and a bit of fun along the way! It  is definitely going to be a special year, since it is once again a drupa year. Let’s hope the biggest print trade show in the world proves that the graphic arts industry is still alive and kicking. I will hopefully get the opportunity to visit the show. It isn’t that far from where I live, so I wouldn’t even mind going ‘in style’, with a Mercedes-Benz O 321 H bus from the same era when drupa first took place.

 

Looking back at 2011

During the year I copy and paste news from the prepress, printing and publishing industry to a page in my history of prepress and publishing overview. I just finished the page about 2011, which has been a pretty tumultuous year.

Real designers use drop shadows

In web design you can either fake drop shadows by creating them inside images or you can use CSS3 styling.  I decided this place could use an update and went for an HTML5 & CSS3 overhaul. You are looking at the result, which may still change slightly as I refine the layout and fix bugs. Among the changes to the site are a slightly wider layout, custom fonts for both headlines and body text, a more colorful banner and of course that subtle but all-important drop shadow on the title of each page.

Editorial, prepress and printing in the 70s

Three pages and more than a dozen pictures document the way the Daily Titan was created and printed during the 70′s.

Tsgrooten antiphonary

An antiphonary or antiphonal is a liturgical song book that contains brief chants sung by a choir to accompany psalms. This site now has a page about the Tsgrooten antiphonary with a few pictures of this magnificent masterpiece. For centuries this choir book was kept in a Belgian abbey. Recently it has been acquired by the Flemish Community. They set up a very nice web site where you can admire pages in high resolution.

Lemonade

I just love Clients From Hell. This site had ‘from hell’ pages long before they even started though.

Client: Do you do lemonade?
Me: Do we do… lemonade?
Client: Yes, I was told you do that here.
Me: I’m sorry, this is a graphics and print shop.
Client: I know that. I’m not an idiot.
Me: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to -
Client: Look! If you can’t lemonade these papers for me then I’ll go somewhere else!
Me: Do you mean… laminate?

The poll: Which prepress workflow do you use

This poll was created to accompany a new page on how to select a prepress workflow.

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.

Older comments can be found here.