Dealing with Service Bureaus

Service bureaus are great: They keep and maintain all the equipment, know the ins and outs of both your software and your printing press requirements, and turn jobs around quickly ‚ at least most of the time. Working with a service bureau involves commitment and communication between both parties. They need your business; you need their expertise and equipment.

To ensure that you get what you want (fast, accurate service) and that the service bureau gets what it wants (no-hassle clients and printing jobs), make sure that you both understand your standards and needs. Keep in mind that the service bureau has many customers, all of whom do things differently. Service bureaus likewise must not impose unreasonable requirements just for the sake of consistency, because customers can have good reasons for doing things differently.

Paying attention to a few basic issues can help you establish a productive relationship with your service bureau.

Sending documents versus output files

Since you have the Package feature, do you give the service bureau your actual InDesign documents or do you send an EPS, PostScript, or PDF output file?

Cross-Reference ‚  

Chapter 32 shows you how to create output files

The answer depends on several things:

• A document file, even if the graphics files are copied with it, takes less space than an output file created from your document, which means fewer disks or cartridges to sort through and less time copying files from your media to theirs.

• A document file can be changed accidentally , resulting in incorrect output. For example, a color might be changed accidentally when the service bureau checks your color definitions to make sure that spot colors are translated to process colors. Or document preferences might be lost, resulting in text reflow .

• The service bureau cannot always edit an output file. So the service bureau may not be able to come to your rescue if you make a mistake such as forgetting to print registration marks when creating the output file or specifying landscape printing mode for a portrait document.

Basically, the question is "Whom do you trust more ‚ yourself or the service bureau?" Only you can answer that question. But in either case, there are two things that you can do to help prevent miscommunication : Provide the report file to the service bureau and also provide a proof copy of your document. The service bureau uses these tools to see if its output matches your expectations ‚ regardless of whether you provided a document file or output file.

Determining output settings

A common area of miscommunication between designers and service bureaus is determining who sets controls over line screens, registration marks, and other output controls. Whoever has the expertise to make the right choices should handle these options. And it should be clear to both parties who is responsible for what aspect of output controls ‚ you don't want to use conflicting settings or accidentally override the desired settings:

• Assuming you're sending InDesign documents to the service bureau, for output controls such as line screens and angles, the layout artist should determine these settings and specify them on the proof copy provided to the service bureau. That way the service bureau can use its own PPD files rather than take the chance you had incorrect or outdated ones.

• If the publication has established production standards for special effects or special printing needs or if the job is unusual, I recommend that the layout artist determine the settings for such general printing controls as the registration marks and the printer resolution.

  Cross-Reference ‚  

  InDesign print-control setup is described in Chapter 31

• For issues related to the service bureau's internal needs and standards, such as how much gap to have between pages and what trapping settings should be, I recommend that the service bureau determine its own settings. If you're sending the service bureau output files instead of InDesign documents, you'll have to enter such settings in the Print dialog box pane before creating the file, so be sure to coordinate these issues with the service bureau in advance.

• Issues related to the printing press (such as which side of the negative the emulsion should be on), should be coordinated with the printer and service bureau. Again, let the service bureau enter this data unless you send output files.

In all cases, determine who is responsible for every aspect of output controls to ensure that someone does not specify a setting outside his or her area of responsibility without first checking with the other parties.

Note ‚  

Smart service bureaus do know how to edit an output file to change some settings, such as dpi and line-screen, that are encoded in those files, but don't count on their doing that work for you except in emergencies. And then they should let you know what they did and why. And remember: not all output files can be edited (such as EPS and PostScript files created as binary files), or they can be edited only in a limited way (such as PDF files).

Ensuring correct bleeds

When you create an image that bleeds, it must actually print beyond the crop marks. There must be enough of the bleeding image that if the paper moves slightly in the press, the image still bleeds. (Most printers expect ¹ / ₈ inch, or about a pica, of trim area for a bleed .) In most cases, the document page is smaller than both the page size (specified in InDesign through the File ‚ Document Setup option) and the paper size, so that the margin between pages is sufficient to allow for a bleed. If your document page is the same size as your paper size, the paper size limits how much of your bleed actually prints: Any part of the bleed that extends beyond the paper size specified is cut off. (This problem derives from the way PostScript controls printing; it has nothing to do with InDesign.)

Note ‚  

This paper-size limit applied even if you set bleed and slug space in the Document Setup dialog box. These tell the printer how much of material outside the page boundaries to output, so they're not cropped out automatically. But the paper, film negatives , or plates they are output to still has to be large enough to physically accommodate them.

Make sure that your service bureau knows that you're using bleeds and whether you specified a special paper or page size because that may be a factor in the way the operator outputs your job.

Sending oversized pages

If you use a paper size larger than U.S. letter size (8.5 by 11 inches), tell the service bureau in advance, because the paper size might affect how the operator sends your job to the imagesetter. Many service bureaus use a utility program that automatically rotates pages to save film, because pages rotated 90 degrees still fit along the width of typesetting paper and film rolls. But if you specify a larger paper size to make room for bleeds or because your document will be printed at tabloid size, this rotation might cause the tops and/or bottoms of your document pages to be cut off.

I've worked with service bureaus that forgot that they loaded this page-rotation utility, so the operator didn't think to unload it for our oversized pages. It took a while to figure out what was going on because my publication's layout staff were certain that we weren't doing the rotation (the service bureau assumed we had), and the service bureau had forgotten that it was using the rotation utility.