WORKING WITH TEXT
When working with small text, it’s best not to use
colours which contain more than one ink. All printing
presses have a tiny variation in the positioning of the
different colour printing plates. It’s fine to use coloured
text in headlines or type above, say, 12 point, but below
that the blurring will be noticable and won’t look too
hot. The same thing happens when you knock white
text out of a coloured background made from more
than one ink.
Be careful if you are putting text over a photographic background. You’ll make the text very
hard to read. To overcome this, take the photograph into an image-editing package and ‘bleach’
or lighten the image. You will have to lighten the image quite a bit more than you may think
is necessary – always think to yourself “is it more important to see the image, or read the text?”
If the text is more important, it may be best not to put it over the photograph at all.
Some text effects are known to cause problems, so don’t use underline, shadow, strikethrough
and any item from “text effects” menu. Also, Quark ‘P’, ‘B’ and ‘I’ styles aren’t reliable.
Include all fonts that you have used. Postscript fonts come in two parts – the screen font
and the printer font. We need both, so please make sure you send both. Postscript fonts are
the most reliable format. True Type fonts only come in one part. To comply with the licence
agreement, you should remove the fonts from your system whilst we are processing your
jobs.
If you are going “cross-platform”, ie. from PC to Mac, remember that fonts don’t travel well.
Check that we’ve got the same font and provide hard copies. We’ll need you to check a proof
carefully since even fonts from the same place can have slight differences resulting in reflow
and words disappearing.
It’s fine to convert headlines and large text to curves, paths or outlines (which means that
you don’t need to supply the fonts). Just watch your ‘flatness’ settings – set flatness to 1 and
device resolution to 2400dpi.
We really advise against setting text in a bitmap application like Photoshop – the text will not
be nearly as clear as if it were vector text from InDesign or Illustrator, say.
One final note: Don’t use “Multiple Master/Metric” fonts as they are not compatible with
our process. Such fonts have the letters MM in their title.
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