What Does Digital Prepress Means?
The process of making files for a printing press or preparing them to print is known as Pre-press. “Digital Prepress” is a modern terminology that replaces the traditional one with digital file preparation for print. The availability of graphics and page layout programs hugely facilitates and speeds up design work. With the help of digital processing, achieving page layout is no longer a complex work. You can simply send and exchange documents electronically by eliminating the time and cost factor of physical delivery. Get your file imaged onto the printing plates at a low cost.
Digital Prepress Prerequisites
Digital processing usually has electronic output in PDFs or application-based files with varying sizes and file types, which can affect the efficiency of digital prepress. Therefore, it wisely requires a trained prepress technician to deliver competent results efficiently and quickly.
The digital prepress process typically begins after Word manuscripts are submitted to the prepress company. Let’s have a look at the following procedures.
Copyediting – Ensuring consistency in the written work, Making the content fair and reasonable, and refining the content without altering the original intent. This process also includes formatting the content in their style using publisher-specific custom automation tools and services provided by the client.
Typesetting – The process involves creating a proof, such that designing a layout using one of the leading design applications, (e.g. Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, Arbortext (3B2), etc. The correction process includes image retouching, for which Adobe Photoshop is the dominant application.
Proofreading – The ultimate step before publishing a document where Typos and formatting errors are checked thoroughly. The step also ensures that the document strictly adheres to the design/layout style guide.
Digital structuring of the content – And finally Structuring of text for the final display. It’s done using a markup language, which is a means of providing layout instructions for displaying the text of the document or book.
Pre-Flighting – The final pages now go through the rest of the processes, where validation is performed to verify the data meets all the necessary printer requirements.
Creating high-quality print files – The process of creating a high-resolution PDF file that meets all the specifications to produce a high-quality print.
Digital prepress checklist – The collection of methods accompanied by a digital prepress collectively represents a workflow. Each process is specific with the favoured use of technologies. Whatever the workflow is, the bottom line is that every step of the process must be managed precisely, It requires collective participation and coordination from each of the digital prepress processes mentioned above.
Publishing Platform
Desktop publishing uses the computer and certain types of software to combine text and graphics to create documents such as newsletters, brochures, books, etc.
Macintosh and Desktop platforms with below-industry-standard software applications
Page layout (Adobe InDesign) – Page layout is the process of placing and arranging text and graphics on the page to create documents such as newsletters, brochures, books, etc. The page layout refers to the actual document and its composition. The major desktop publishing software programs are known as page layout applications.
Illustration: Adobe Illustrator – Digital part of a page mainly consist of Vector graphics, Raster images and text
Vector graphics are mathematical-based objects. All lines, shapes, etc. of a vector-based image are independent. Vector images are usually created and edited using “drawings” or “Illustrations” programs such as Adobe Illustrator.
Bitmap images known as raster images are based on pixels. This means that the images are usually created and edited in “photo” or “paint” programs such as Adobe Photoshop and the image position and colour information are stored in individual pixels mapped to a grid.
Image editing can be managed by using Adobe Photoshop
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Checklist:
- The checklist to bypass common errors associated while preparing a digital file for print.
- Run spell check
- All raster images (colour or grayscale) should be 300 dpi resolution
- Line art is a high-contrast graphic image made of a single colour with an effective resolution of 1200 dpi.
- Convert RGB Files to CMYK
- Trim & Bleed the digital file layout
- Opentype is the current industry standard font type
- All Images should be linked to your document, not embedded. As Embedding makes your file size very large.
Conclusion
Needless to say Digital prepress has become the most preferred choice for publishers to print on demand and has grown demand rapidly over the last decade. Electronic publishing has more advantages compared to traditional publishing like Minimizing manual processing, Cost and time-effective, Better reading experience provision to store material digitally, and Interactive and Up to date content (animation, audio, video clips, and hyperlinks).
Want to experience the benefits of digital printing? Apex Solution Ltd would be happy to offer you the best service and support with the best quality and quick response.
