Daily Dose of DTP: 3. Is Prepress Anything Like Permanent Press?

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Daily Dose of DTP 3. Is Prepress Anything Like Permanent Press? From Jacci Howard Bear, your Guide to Desktop Publishing You've got this idea for a wonderfully creative business card with the perfect fonts, a great piece of clip art, and you've chosen a lovely ivory card stock to print on. But after painstakingly transferring your great idea to your desktop publishing software then taking the file to your local quick print shop to have them whip up a few hundred cards they tell you the file won't print -- or worse, they print the cards but the color is all wrong and that lovely font you chose suddenly looks a lot like something from a bad typewriter. Chances are you skipped the crucial prepress stage. Prepress is a big topic which we won't try to cover completely just yet. But it's important that you learn the who, what, when, where, and why of prepress. We'll tackle the how later... Class Notes: This is not simply a word-a-day course. The lessons follow a specifi c order in roughly the following groupings: General concepts > Things you need > Font specifics > Image specifics > Prepress & Printing > Rules & Tutorials (bold indicates the stage in which this lesson falls) Today's Definition Prepress Before you press, prepress. Today's Trivia Prepress Exposed Traditional prepress uses camera operators and strippers. No, I'm not talking about making X-rated movies. The camera operators take a picture of the material to be printed and make negatives. Strippers cut the negatives to the required size and arrange and tape the film negatives onto flats or sheets from which printing plates are made for the printing press. These types of prepress jobs are on the decline, in large part due to desktop publishing. Learn more What Are You Learning? Time for a Testimonial In case you started wondering whether this was any way to learn desktop publishing... Posted in the DTP Classroom: "I have noticed, and not only me, that since I have been doing the classes, my designing is improved, even though DTP is not design, it certainly has helped! Today somebody asked a collegue of mine about the meaning of a word (rasterizing). He didn't know, but I knew the answer and I have shown him the related DTP definitions (Bitmap and Vector). I have got my topics to talk about at parties, whenever they swing onto DTP subjects... Eh, eh!" You get out of this course what you put into it. (Desktop Publishing as party chatter? Hmmmm....) This email is written by: Jacci Howard Bear Desktop Publishing Guide Email Me | My Blog | My Forum   Missing a lesson? Click here. About U. is our collection of free online courses designed to help you learn a new skill, solve a problem, get something done, or just learn more about your world. Sign up now, and we will email you lessons on a daily or weekly basis. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the About.com 'Daily Dose of DTP' email. If you wish to unsubscribe, please click here. About respects your privacy: Our Privacy Policy Contact Information: 249 West 17th Street New York, NY, 10011 © 2010 About.com   Advertisement