Scenic Tour of a Typical Printing Plant

Depending on the size and structure of your print service provider, some of the functions described in this section might be combined. For example, in some companies, job planning might be done by a dedicated planner, by customer service representatives, or by an estimator. And some prepress departments make no distinction between preflight (looking for job errors) and productionthey just watch for problems as they prepare a job for later prepress functions. The departments are described in the approximate order in which they handle your job. Figure 1.2 provides an aerial view of a fictional printing company to give you a general idea of job flow.

Figure 1.2. Job flow in a typical printing company. Your mileage may vary. Some printers divide departments differently, and some use external suppliers for operations such as custom finishing. (Dashed lines indicate functions that may not be performed by all print service providers.)

The flow of a job in a given printing company is governed by the company's capabilities and the type of work they usually perform. For example, a small printing company that specializes in business collateral such as letterheads, business cards, and envelopes is not likely to have binding equipment such as saddle stitchers or custom inline inkjet heads for on-press personalization.

Sales

Typically, the print salesperson will be your first contact and will set things in motion for you by initiating your job's entry into the printing plant's workflow. At this early point in the life of the job, it's important to discuss any concerns you may have about the job. Learn as much as you can about the processes that will be used in manufacturing your job. If your job will require any special stock such as vellum or heavy cover stock, discuss this with the salesperson. Also discuss any special finishing treatments that will be used, such as embossing or die cutting. The salesperson will probably be the person who provides you with an estimate of job costs and gives you an idea of the timeline of the job's trip through the printing plant. Initially, the salesperson may be your primary contact, but your job will probably be assigned to a customer service representative (CSR) early in the job.

Customer Service

After you submit your job files, the CSR is likely to be your prime contact point throughout the remainder of the job. If the production staff has any questions about how job issues should be handled, they'll ask the CSR to call or e-mail you for the answer. If you need to send corrected or updated files, you may be asked to contact the CSR rather than the salesperson, since the CSR is closer to the action and more likely to know the current status of your job in the workflow. A skilled, proactive CSR is your best friend and often has the foresight to help you anticipate and prevent problems. Ideally, the CSR is fluent in both design-speak and printing concepts and can act as a translator to keep the lines of communication open between you and production staff for the duration of the job.

Planning, Estimating, and Scheduling

Once your job is accepted by the print service provider, it will be assigned a job number and some sort of identifying name. This information will become part of a printed job ticket, which will travel with the job materials. The job ticket will be affixed to a physical job jacket containing job materials such as your disks, your printed hard copy of the job, and other pertinent pieces that are accumulated during the life of the job. Eventually, the job jacket may contain intermediate proofs, printed instructions for correction cycles, and approved final proofs to be used as a reference during the press run. The attached job ticket serves as a job identifier and job information reference as the materials travel through the printing plant. Some printing plants use bar codes on their job tickets to aid in job tracking, but many rely on plant employees to note a job's process by making entries in computer-based tracking systems.

Job ticketing conventions vary between printing companies, but the job ticket will contain vital information about the job's requirements, including such information as:

• Job number (a unique identifier assigned at the print service provider)

• Client contact information

• Internal contacts (salesperson, CSR)

• Intended press

• Inks, including specially mixed inks

• Due dates (final print, as well as intermediate events, such as page proofs)

• Line screen

• Custom handling required, such as special folding or other finishing operations

Planners establish the basic flow of your job, including its timeline. The timeline identifies when each segment of the job will take place and how the print service provider can wedge your job into the ocean of other jobs occurring at the same time. They may also plan how jobs will run on press to take advantage of available timeyour job may be combined with another, similar job to run simultaneously and save on the time and materials devoted to makeready.

Like air traffic controllers, schedulers track all the jobs running through a printing plant at any given time. They have to ensure that all the plant's equipment is kept humming and that deadlines are met. As they juggle all the live jobs in the plant, they have to take into consideration any jobs whose progress hits a snag. They're constantly rearranging indicators on large scheduling boards, which resemble huge bulletin boards or whiteboards with all jobs represented by identifying tickets or labels.

Estimators determine job costs, including labor, paper, ink, proofing materials, as well as press time and bindery time. In some plants, estimating and planning tasks are combined. Once the estimating and planning groundwork is laid, the job is often subjected to a preflight process. In some printing plants, preflight is performed by CSRs. In most plants, however, preflight is done by prepress operators when the job enters the prepress department.

Preflight

On its way to prepress production, your job will usually be run through a preflight process to check for problems with setup and content. Don't take it personally. It's better to find problems early in the job rather than later when deadlines loom. For application files such as QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign^® files, many prepress departments use dedicated preflight software such as FlightCheck^® Professional from Markzware. Some departments rely on dedicated preflight operators to manually check files for problems, while some combine FlightCheck with manual checks geared toward the printer's particular workflow. To preflight submitted PDF files, many print service providers use PDF-specific software such as Enfocus PitStop, PDF/X Checkup from Apago, or the print production tools in Adobe Acrobat^® Professional. However preflight is performed, when problems are found, you may be asked whether you'd like to fix the problems yourself or incur a charge for letting the printer fix them. Common problems include issues such as lack of sufficient bleed, misspelled words, overset text, incorrect or extraneous spot colors, or wrong document size.

Preflight personnel are also often responsible for organizing job files into a standard folder hierarchy used by the printing plant, which may require that they rename some files and reestablish image links in page layouts as a result.

Prepress

These days, many prepress departments refer to themselves as electronic prepress departments, a holdover from earlier days when the computer-based activities were a parallel process, and manual prepress activities such as film stripping still encompassed much of the work. But now you'd be hard-pressed to find extensive stripping capabilities in all but the smallest shops. As long as plates were still being exposed manually from large film flats, strippers would be called upon to make last-minute corrections by taping out or grafting in replacement film pieces. But with the overwhelming move to computer-to-plate (CTP), dedicated film strippers and their light tables are increasingly rare.

Production

Many of today's affordable desktop scanners can produce high-quality results, but some designers prefer to do quick-and-dirty FPO (For Position Only) scans to use in their page layouts while color professionals at the print service provider do the final, high-resolution scans. Once the job enters prepress production at the printer, the FPO images will be replaced with the final scans. Any silhouetting (eliminating backgrounds) will have to be performed at this point, which will add to job cost and time. If your printer does the scans and provides you with low-resolution, placeholder images to use in your layouts, replacing those placeholders with the high-resolution images will already be part of the standard job costs. Even if there are no true errors in the way the file is built, it's likely that prepress production operators will still need to tweak your job to get it ready for other parts of the workflow, such as raster image processing (RIPping), trapping, and imposition.

For example, if your job contains large solid areas of black, the prepress production operator may replace the single black ink with a rich-black mix such as C60-M40-Y40-K100 to facilitate a good outcome on the press. Another example: Gradients created in QuarkXPress are routinely replaced with Photoshop gradients to prevent a banded appearance in output. Such alterations are for the printer's convenience and are not usually charged to the customer.

Scanning

If you've supplied reflective artwork such as drawings, paintings, or photographic prints as artwork to be placed in the layout, the print service provider or an outside vendor will have to scan the artwork. Whether scanning is performed by you, the print service provider, or someone else, you should expect to see random proofsraw, individual proofs of the artwork before the images are placed into the layoutso that you can determine at an early stage whether color correction or retouching will be necessary. Even the best scan may not be able to initially capture your intent for the image because of the limitations inherent in the scanning process and the inherent difficulty of reproducing some colors in the standard CMYK printing inks. Color correction can compensate for some of these issues, but be prepared for the limitations of CMYK (see Chapter Two, "Ink on Paper," for more on these issues). Early random proofs will prepare you for the appearance of images in the final printed piece.

Image Work

If you're not comfortable with creating clipping paths or performing other image manipulations such as retouching, color correction, or compositing, specialists in the prepress department will do those things. Often, the scanner operator is an accomplished Photoshop user with a good eye for color.

Raster Image Processor (RIP)

Believe it or not, "We RIPped your file" is good news. At its most basic, a RIP interprets the incoming page-description (PostScript or PDF) information and converts that data to a literal bitmap image that instructs the marking engine of the output device how to image the film, plates, or, in the case of toner-based printers, the electrostatic drum (Figure 1.3). Many RIPs also perform other operations, such as in-RIP trapping or the low-resolution to high-resolution image swap functions of an OPI workflow.

Figure 1.3. A RIP is a dedicated computer with specialized software that converts PostScript or PDF information into bitmapped information. This process drives an imagesetter to image film or a platesetter to image plates. Since each manufacturer's RIP consists of a proprietary combination of hardware and software, capabilities differ among brands.

In some workflows, individual pages are processed by the RIP, and then combined in imposition software. In other workflows, PostScript files for individual pages are imposed, and the imposed file is processed by the RIP.

Whereas RIPs usually feed on PostScript, some manufacturers' RIPs such as those from Artwork Systems Group and Global Graphics^® can handle native PDF files. PostScript is actually a programming language that is used to describe and define pages so that output devices know how to image those pages. PDF files contain information that's much like PostScript (and in fact shares many of the concepts of PostScript). But PDFs can also contain information, such as transparency, which goes beyond the capabilities of PostScript. Some RIPs take in PDFs, but internally convert them to PostScript for further processing. This is the source of some imaging errors when you submit PDF files containing native transparency from applications such as InDesign or Adobe Illustrator.^® RIPs that maintain PDFs as PDFs throughout the raster imaging processing, rather than converting PDFs to PostScript, sometimes do a better job of imaging PDF content. The announcement of the Adobe PDF Print Engine opens the way for true PDF-based RIPs from even more vendors.

Trapping

It's necessary to compensate for slight errors in the alignment of the printing inks as they're laid down sequentially on an offset press. Trapping provides a combination of colors at the edges of abutting color areas to camouflage any slippage. See Chapter Two, "Ink on Paper," for an in-depth description of trapping, and why it's necessary. Since trapping itself can be a complex undertaking, and because requirements vary according to printing conditions, this is an arcane art best left to prepress professionals. Aren't you glad? Whereas in the past, trapping was accomplished within originating applications such as Illustrator or QuarkXPress, or with dedicated trapping software, the majority of trapping now takes place at the RIP.

Imposition

Using the job information provided by planners, imposition operators combine individual pages in the proper pagination for plating. In some companies, separate groups handle prepress operations (such as preflight) and plating functions (such as imposition). This allows specialized operators to perform plate-related tasks while general prepress operators continue to do preflight and production. For a more detailed description of imposition, see Chapter 3, "Binding and Finishing."

Proofing

Several different roundsand several different kindsof proofing may occur in the life of a job:

• Random proofs of images early in the job help determine whether color correction or retouching is needed.

• Desktop printer output may be used for internal checks of the content of pages after preflight and before proceeding to prepress production.

• Color or single-color proofs (often called bluelines) after prepress production are used for customer markup or approval before proceeding to imposition and output to film or plates.

• Color proofs of finished pages are used for color match on press. The proofs may be single page proofs, proofs of reader spreads, or proofs of multiple pages in their final imposed position. These proofs are viewed under controlled conditions in a viewing booth, which is painted a neutral gray and uses special lights for a standardized environment. The color temperature (50006500° K) is intended to mimic daylight. You may be asked to sign these proofs to indicate that you approve of the color and the content of the pages. This is often referred to as a contract proof, since it constitutes a contract between you and the printer. Your approval of the proof implies that you're satisfied with the appearance of the proof. The printer is then expected to match the appearance of the contract proof on the press.

• Blueline folded comps, created after imposition, are used on press and in the bindery to check page position and content.

Corrections

Printer alterations are sometimes the result of mistakes that are made during production, but they can also be voluntary changes to a job to ensure satisfactory printing under the press or bindery conditions. For example, if there are large, solid color areas in a single ink, the printer may elect to print that area with two separate applications of the same ink to achieve a uniform appearance on press. Since this is elective, such an alteration is not chargeable to the customer.

Artist alterations (AAs), also called customer alterations, are alterations requested by the designer or the designer's client. AAs include such changes as type changes, replacing images, or moving content. Charges vary depending on the complexity of the change and the stage in the job at which the change is requested. For example, adding a comma at the preflight stage might be a freebie, whereas adding it after the job is on the press might require stopping the press, correcting the affected page, and resending it through the RIP, retrapping, re-imposing, and burning a new plate (or more if the comma affects multiple colors). The new plate (or plates) must be mounted on press, and the makeready process repeated. The expense of labor, materials, and lost press time could be considerable. Once the job is pulled off press, you've lost your slot in the production cycle and, depending on how busy the presses are, you may wait a day or more for another opportunity to run your job.

Creating Plates

In the earlier days of electronic desktop publishing, film was often output for individual pages, and then taped down in flats on large, clear carrier sheets in the proper printing position. (A flat is just that: a flat carrier sheet with one or more pieces of film in final position.) These imposed flats were used to expose printing plates with powerful light sources. Because intermediate films were stripped and combined to create the page films, and then the page films used to expose the plates (or to create huge, composite single films for each plate), some tiny details could be eroded by the multiple generations of exposures. Any errors in aligning the individual pieces would affect the quality on press.

The introduction of computer-to-plate (CTP) revolutionized this process. In a CTP workflow, the imposition is digitally created, and then the printing plate is directly exposed in a large imaging device, using no intermediate film. The photosensitive coating on the imaged plate is chemically developed much like photographic film and baked, if necessary, to harden the image for printing. This usually takes place in an inline unit attached to the exposure unit, so a finished plate emerges ready for mounting on the press. Think of the photosensitive plate coating as being a bit tender while it's still fresh. The plate is heated to stabilize the imaged coating so it will be able to stand up to the rigors of being mounted and used on the printing press.

The elimination of intermediate films reduces opportunities for error and considerably improves the process. There's less chance for loss of detail and, understandably, some cost and time savings.

A variation of this concept is on-press imaging, which is most commonly used on smaller-format presses. Unexposed plates are mounted on the press, and imaging units on the press expose the plates in position. This approach can reduce makeready time because plates are already in position on the press when they're exposed, eliminating handling and possible registration issues.

Pressroom

The printing process that will be used on your job will have some bearing on how your job must be prepared, so the choice of printing process is one more important topic in your initial conversations with a print service provider. Offset printing is probably the process that you envision when someone says "printing press," and it's the printing method you will probably encounter most frequently. But there are other printing methods. The choice of printing process is dictated by the end product. Gravure is often used for long print runs typical of catalogs and magazines. Flexography is used for flexible packaging such as wrappers, foil bags, and labels. Letterpress printing is most often used for artistic applications these days, such as invitations or special publications. You may think of screen printing as only for clothing, such as t-shirts, but it's also capable of producing fine-art pieces, and often used to print on irregular surfaces such as cans, bottles, and other containers.

Increasingly, digital printing is used for short-run printing jobs such as brochures, product literature, mailings, and small-circulation magazines. The ability to utilize variable data with digital printing opens up some interesting possibilities for marketing with printed pieces containing content customized for individual recipients.

Preparation in the pressroom includes adjusting the ink coverage, varying the pressure of the ink-bearing plates and the transfer blankets, and adjusting the paper-feeding mechanisms. Much of this process is facilitated by on-press technology, but the pressmen's instincts are indispensable for fine-tuning the mechanics. The term makeready refers to the process of getting the press up to speed and the ink behavior optimal. The press crew will be using approved contract proofs to guide them in setup. The color and content of the printed piece should match what the client has approved. Once everything is behaving as it should, you may be asked to attend a press check to approve the results, especially if there are special treatments that are difficult to simulate with a contract proof, such as custom-mixed inks or specialty stock.

Other specialty work that may take place in the pressroom includes personalization such as addressing, as well as on-press finishing that might include perforation and scoring. In addition, coatings, such as varnishes, may be applied during the press run. Even fragrances and adhesives may be applied with inline units attached to the press.

Finishing

There's some overlap between the pressroom and a dedicated bindery, since some finishing functions, such as scoring or perforation, may take place on press or may be accomplished in the bindery. But traditionally, operations such as trimming, folding, stitching, and diecutting are done in the finishing department or bindery.

Trimming

Large, heavy-duty trimming equipment is used to cut printed sheets to final size or to cut apart ganged content such as business cards. In some cases, trimming may take place before binding, although some pieces are bound first. For example, a business-reply card would be trimmed to the correct size before being bound into a publication. But the signatures of a book would be trimmed after being bound together in the final book configuration, ensuring that exterior page edges are cleanly aligned.

Folding

Simple folding may be performed inline as the printed sheet comes off the press, or it may be done in the bindery. More complex folding, such as that required for pocket folders or packaging, uses dedicated folding equipment. Some folding operations require handwork to finish the job, which adds to the cost of the job.

Stitching

When a piece requires stitching, thread may be used to anchor the pages of a signature for subsequent binding into a larger, finished book. But wire is often used for stitching, during which it is fed into stitching heads that feed, bend, and cut the wire simultaneously, resulting in a stapled piece. You'll often hear the term saddle stitching, which refers to the way a group of pages is heldas if draped over a saddlewhile it is stitched.

Die Cutting

A die is a shaped metal cutter that is used to trim the edge of a printed piece in a special shape or to punch a shaped hole through the piece. The tabs on the edges of dividers are a simple example of die cutting. Many companies have standing dies for tab creation and can supply you with a template for creating your artwork so that it fits their existing dies. This avoids the cost of creating a custom die.

In a more complex example, a packaging piece may require that the printed sheet be scored and die cut to the final configuration for folding, creating all the interlocking panels that fold up to create the final box. If you're creating artwork for packaging, it's important to work closely with the print service provider and the die creator to ensure that your artwork is correct. Special handling is required at the intersections of panels to avoid artwork falling onto the wrong panel. Many printing companies do not create custom dies in-house, so be prepared for the cost and time involved in creating them. While the design of a custom die can be computerized, the assembly of the die itself still requires the knowledge of skilled craftspeople.

Binding

Many forms of assembly fall under the heading of binding, from stitching to bookbinding. The most common forms of binding are saddle stitching (see the previous section on stitching) and perfect binding, in which multiple signatures are combined into a bundle, anchored with an adhesive, and then bound with tape or paper binding to hold them together.

Additional binding methods include coil binding, comb binding, and wire binding. The binding method may require that you avoid placing artwork in a specified margin so that it clears the punching or binding area. Consult with the print service provider early in the job to determine what the practical page area will be when binding is taken into consideration.

Gluing

Binding methods such as perfect binding require gluing to keep all the pages together. But gluing is also an integral part of the manufacturing process for pocket folders and packaging that require folding. Because glue should be applied to a clean, ink-free substrate, artwork for the job needs to provide areas for glue application. Consult with the print service provider as you create your files so you'll know where glue needs to be applied. You may also request that they modify your artwork to accommodate gluing.

Fulfillment and Shipping

Some printing companies provide services beyond the production of printed pieces. Many offer mailing and fulfillment services, or they partner with other companies to provide such services. Fulfillment is especially useful for product literature and other pieces with a long life span, such as pocket folders and presentation binders. Rather than requiring the customer to store boxes or materials, the printer keeps the inventory and ships it as needed.

Printers who specialize in mailers such as catalogs often offer mailing as part of the job cost and process. This may include variable data addressing (whether on-press or offline) as well as the actual mailing.