Prepress Acronyms

AA Author Alteration

A/V Audio Visual

AC Alternating Current (wall plug)

AI Adobe Illustrator or Artificial Intelligence

ALE Application Launching and Embedding

ALU Arithmetic Logic Unit

APP Application

BIN Binary

BIOS Basic Input Output system

BIT Binary Digit

Bitmap Graphic Format based on resolution or pixels

BW Black & White

BYTE Binary Table

C Coulomb

CC Customer Change

CAB Cabinet File

CAD Computer Aided Design

CAM Computer Aided Manufacturing

CD Compact Disk

CIA Confidentiality Integrity Authentication

CIE Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage, International

CMOS Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor

CMYK Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

CPU Central Processing Unit

CSV Comma Separated Value or Computer System Validation

CT Continuous Tone or Contone

CTP Computer to Plate

DC Direct Current (battery)

DCS Digital Color Separation

DFS Distributed File System

DI Direct Imaging

DOS Disk Operating System

DPI Dots Per Inch

DSL Digital Subscriber Line

DTP Desk Top Publishing or Direct to Press

DVD Digital Video Disk

E-Book Electronic Book

EDI Electronic Data Exchange

EE Extended Edition

EMAIL Electronic Mail

EMF Enhanced Metafile

EMM Expanded Memory Manager

ENG Electronic News Gathering

EP Electrophotographic

EPOD Electronic Publishing On Demand

EPP Electronic Prepress

EPS Encapsulated PostScript

ERA Electrically Reconfigurable Array

FAX Facsimile

FB Face Book

FIOS Fiber Optic Service

FKEY Function Key

FPO For Position Only

FTP File Transfer Protocol

FW Fire Wall

GB Gega Byte 1,000,000,000,000 Bytes

GCR Gray Component Replacement

GDI Graphic Developments Inc. or Graphic Device Interface

GFS Google File System

GIF Graphics Interchange Format

H&J Hyphenation and Justification

HEX Hexadecimal (base 16)

HI-FI High Fidelity

HI-Res High Resolution

HSB Hue Saturation and Brightness

HSL Hue Saturation Lightness

HTML Hyper Text Markup Language

HZ Hertz

I/O Input Output

IC Integrated Circuit

IDE Integrated Drive Electronics

IE Internet Explorer

IFF Interchange File Format

INF Information File

IP Internet Protocol

IPP Internet Printing Protocol

IS Information Systems

ISP Internet Service Provider

IT Information Technology

JDF Job Description Format

JPEG Joint Photographic Experts Group

KB Kilo Byte 1000 Bytes

LAB L* stands for luminance, a* is the red-green axis, and b* is the blue-yellow axis

LAN Local Area Network

LCD Liquid crystal Display or Liquid Crystal Diode

Linux Open Source Multiuser Operating System

LS Line Screen

LZW Lempel Ziv Welch Compression

Mac OS X Macintosh Operating System 10

MB Mega Byte 1,000,000 Bytes

MP3 MPEG-1 Audio Level III

MP4 Mixed Audio and Video Images etc.

MS SQL Microsoft SQL Server

MS Microsoft

NAT Network Address Translation

NVRAM Non Volatile Random Access Memory

ODP Open Document Presentation

OPI Open Prepress Interface

PC Personal Computer

PDF Portable Document Format

PICT Picture File

PNG Portable Networks Graphics

PPC Power PC

PPD PostScript Printer Description

PPI Pixels Per Inch

PS PostScript

QC Quality Control

RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disk

RAM Random Access Memory

RGB Red Green Blue

RIP Raster Image Processor

ROM Read Only Memory

SAN Storage Area Network

SATA Serial ATA (IDE)

SCSI Small Computer Systems Interface

SVG Scalable Vector Graphic

TB Tera Byte 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes

TGA Targa File

TIFF Tagged Image File Format

TP Twisted Pair Wire

TT True Type

TX Transmit

TYPO Typographic Error

UCR Under Color Removal

UDP User Datagram Protocol

UNIX Multiuser operating system

USB Universal Serial Bus

VA Voltage

VAC Voltage Alternating Current

VGA Video Graphics Array

VM Virtual Memory or Virtual Machine

VoiP Voice Over Internet Protocol

WAN Wide Area Network

WAV Windows Digital Audio File

WEP Wired Equivalent Privacy

WIDI Wireless Display

WI-FI Wireless Local Area Network

WMF Windows Meta File

WPA WI-FI Protection Access

XML Extensible Markup Language

YUV Y=Luma or Brightness U&V=Color Information

ZIP Compress a file with PKZIP

Updated Customer Guide

You can now download the new GDI Customer Web Print User Guide from our down load page.

Embedding Fonts in a PDF Workflow

Fonts!

Why are fonts still and issue in a PDF workflow?

During early days of PostScript printing, we only had to deal with Type1 and True Type fonts. Now we have multiple master fonts, fonts for home use, fonts for web use and fonts for printing among others.

When creating a document in a page layout program (Indesign or Quark, not Microsoft Word or Publisher), the operator must be aware of the fonts installed on their computer. If the document is to be opened on a different computer the “identical” fonts must also be installed on the other computer. Even though Macs and PCs have gotten closer together we still experience cross platform issues with fonts. Then there is the issue of embedding the font when creating the PDF and what’s up with some font embedding and some fonts not embedding?

Well not all fonts are created equal. Not to mention names but, SF fonts are intended for web only and/or home use and will not embed when the operator creates the PDF. Fonts acquired as a throw in with some applications are not intended for print use. Ornamental fonts on Christmas or Birthday cards are cute and cool, again they were not created for high-resolution printing. Other reasons for fonts not embedding include having the screen font installed without the bitmapped or printer font. Corrupted fonts may also not embed.

So how does a prepress operator guard against providing their print provider with a PDF that has all of the fonts embedded. In the case of GDI we provide PDF Job Setting files on our website http://www.graphicdevelopments.com/home/downloads.html. Using our job setting file will insure that all embeddable fonts will be embedded.

Now that we think we have created a good PDF how can we check it to make sure all the fonts are embedded? If you are lucky enough to have Enfocus Pitstop, you can check and embed or replace any font that Pitstop deems not embedded. For those of us that live in a more frugal world, Acrobat Pro has a built in feature in it’s preflight utility that allows the user to embed fonts. To access the Preflight Utility go to Advanced-Preflight. However, you will have to look at the preflight report if you want to make sure all the fonts did get embedded. See the screen shot below:

Last but not least, GDI does have Pitstop and a great workflow that allows us to embed fonts at the preflight stage or at the ripping stage of document processing. That requires a little extra effort on our part, but if our customer can’t make the file work we can. And we provide this service free of charge and in most cases transparent to our customers.

One of the worst mistakes a designer can make!

Using RGB (red, green, blue) when designing for print is one of the worst No-Nos a designer can make. And it puts the printer in a very difficult position.

As a printer we have several options.
1: Return the file to the designer
2: Convert the file using Pitstop
3: Convert the file using Acrobat
4: Convert the file when we rip the file
5: Export all the RGB data to Adobe Photoshop and covert it to CMYK

Unfortunately options 2-5 may have undesirable results. Each of these option may not produce the RGB color accuracy that the designer or the designers customer/editor/publisher may have intended. Every prepress program uses a different color conversion engine and or profile converter, including Adobe Photoshop. In addition, the RGB color space has a larger color gamut than does our press cmyk gamut. Red and Greens get clipped in cmyk. Black type and black fills will convert to CMYK black (high percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black). Any misregistration on press will appear ans blurry type or filled in reverse type. Option 5 is time consuming and can be considered a chargeable AA.

So as a printer we ask our friends to verify that all text and images be checked in Adobe Acrobat prior to uploading the files to us. In addition, if pages are black and white it would be a good idea to convert them to black and white prior to sending them to us as well. We all want to achieve expected results and these tips may help you get their.

To check you color in Adobe Acrobat without pitstop. Open the file in Acrobat. Go to the "Advanced" pull down menu, "Print Production", "Output Preview". Select the "show" rgb. If your file has rgb data it will display in the file. Change to "show" cmyk and Acrobat will show just the cmyk data. View the sample images below. If you have determined that the file has RGB data go back to your layout program and fix the RGB.