Use A PDF For Commercial Printing

Once you have finished the design of your brochure, newsletter, business card, letterhead, or other project, consider using a PDF file to upload to your commercial printer if you have the capability of creating one. Just make sure that your printer can print from a PDF file before you do it. Most commercial printers and especially online printers can accept them and most of the times prefer them. The reason simply is that the file is a compressed file that contains all the fonts, graphics and all elements of the design to print correctly. This makes preflighting the job much easier and the chance for an error to occur much less. Also if you are uploading the file online, the compression that a PDF file will give you will make the job take less time to upload. Just be sure that when you are distilling your file into a PDF that you set the settings for Press Quality if using Acrobat Distiller or if using another PDF program, just be sure that you have 300 dpi set as the resolution.

The only catch using a PDF file is that the project must be printed in four color process or CMYK. That is because a PDF file will color separate into the four process colors. Unless the printer has software that is able to convert the design back into spot colors they are going to print it CMYK. If you are going with an online source, then you will want them to stick with CMYK because they will be running your job in combination with other jobs in order to give you the best possible price.