Preparing your PDF

PDF (Portable Document Format) is the required way that documents need to be sent to us. Once a Design is completed it must be output in Press Quality PDF format ready to be printed.
A press ready PDF is a document created on a high enough quality setting to print from. We recommend using the standard or professional editions of adobe acrobat which are available from www.adobe.com.

Where designs are built up using a number of transparencies it makes a much more reliable PDF if these layers are flattened. It may be worth saving your original ‘unflattened’ document so that you can edit the artwork at a later date if required.

Ultimate flattening means having all the design on a single layer. However this may not be desirable because, in Photoshop for example, text layers must be converted from Vector to Bitmap to merge with picture layers. The recommended approach is to flatten all bitmap layers to one but leave the text as text. This will give much better quality text in the finished print.

Ensure that all pictures used in the design are either embedded or that the links to external images are correct.. Check that all images used are CMYK and that they are at least 400dpi size for size in the document. Whilst it is perfectly possible to print from lower resolution and RGB images the quality of the finished print will be compromised.

There are a small number of fonts which have licensing restrictions attached. These restrictions can prevent the fonts being embedded in the PDF even if that request is made in the PDF setup. One solution to this perennial problem is to avoid fonts with these onerous restrictions. Another may be to change your design by selecting another font with less onerous restrictions. A third solution available in many drawing programmes is to convert the fonts used in to curves.

Whilst the creation of PDFs is normally a foolproof process, it is certain that when it is least expected and most disastrous the process will work poorly. It is absolutely essential to check that the PDFs created look the way they should before sending them to print.

PDF Checklist:-

  • Ensure the Correct Bleed and Quiet Border have been used.
  • Flatten Layers Where Possible.
  • Check Image Quality.
  • Check that Fonts have been embedded.
  • Check the created PDF looks as intended.