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What actually happens to a customer's artwork on the way to press — bleed, crop marks, trim, resolution, and where the software stops.
Customer files turn up wrong in one of five ways: too small, no bleed, wrong shape, wrong details printed on the artwork, or wrong colour. Usually two or three of them at once, on the same file.
A customer sends two pages as a PDF and another as a PNG. You can upload them together in Print Prepper, set the file order, and work through the resulting pages in one job. The output is one print PDF and one soft proof.
A page can have the right dimensions and still contain the wrong phone number, a clipped logo or unwanted marks from an earlier export. The crop stage is where you check those details in Print Prepper, one page at a time, before building the print PDF.
A finished business card is one thing. A sheet of that card, spaced for printing and cutting, is another. Print Prepper's Imposition step takes one finished page and repeats it at actual size on a sheet, with its own preview and downloadable PDF.
3mm past the trim on every side, or 0.125in if the job is specced in inches. Go to 5mm when the stock is thick or the book is thick. Large format is a different animal and the allowance comes out of the finishing rather than the printing: enough to disappear into the hem, the pole pocket or the frame wrap, which can mean 25mm or more.
Most jobs that go wrong go wrong because two people used the same word for different things. This page collects the terms that come up between a printer and a customer, with what each one means and where it gets muddled. Definitions are drawn from the ISO and ICC specifications and the vendor documentation where those exist, and marked as trade convention where they don't. Use the headings to link straight to a term when you need to settle something over email.
A screen makes colour by adding light. A press makes it by putting ink on paper and subtracting light. The two produce different sets of colours, and those sets are different shapes. Some of what a customer approved on their monitor cannot be printed by any press, on any stock, at any price.
Divide the pixel dimensions by the finished size in inches. That number is the resolution the job prints at, and nothing in the file header changes it.
Put through the file that's been sitting in your inbox since Tuesday.
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