By signcraft
Posted on Monday, June 26th, 2023
Most of the wholesale digital printing companies prefer to get a PDF with the fonts converted to curves. This helps ensure that the printed output matches the original file as closely as possible. There are multiple PDF “presets” in most software, though, and they can produce different results. Doug Downey [The Image Factory, Stratford, Ontario, Canada] learned years ago that choosing the correct one ensures consistent output every time.
“When I export a completed design to PDF for printing,” Doug says, “I use the PDF/X-1a:2001 preset in CorelDRAW. I started doing this years ago, and I have never had a color problem with the output I get back. I have sent it to many different companies—for printing on vinyl, corrugated plastic, banners, flags, pens, business cards or whatever. Everything comes back just as I saw it on the screen.
“You still want to take a minute and check your proof before sending it to the printer. Check your fonts and colors. Some colors like fluorescent pink are hard to reproduce accurately in print. You may have to adjust the colors in your original file to get the vibrance that you want.”
Interestingly, while this article was coming together, a reader contacted SignCraft about a strange problem he had encountered. A customer had sent him a JPG file at a size too small to use on their sign. He found the typeface that had been used on the original file and recreated the graphic as a new vector file. The design used pale green letters.
When he sent the file to the company that provided his large format printing, though, the lowercase letter “i”—which occurred twice in the company name—printed obviously lighter than the other letters. Both he and the output provider tried several changes and tests to find the problem. We shared Doug’s method, and changing the PDF preset to PDF/X-1a:2001 solved the problem.
“It was a $1000 job,” the reader told us later, “and I was almost ready to tell the customer that I couldn’t do it for them. Changing the preset fixed it, and the output looked great.”
