Preparing a Publication for the Printer

Adobe Software Lets You Easily Prepare Your Files for Printing

If you’re publishing a book or a magazine, you can easily prepare your files for printing using Adobe Pagemaker, Photoshop, Distiller and Acrobat. Picture and ad files are created in Adobe Photoshop. All text is done in Adobe Pagemaker. Files are converted to PDF’s with Adobe Distiller and can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat.

First, you’ll need to create and prepare your files that contain photographs or ads. If you’re creating a color ad, you’ll need to open a new file and specify your ad size and set the resolution to 200 pixels/inch and the mode to CMYK. For black and white ads, you’ll set the resolution to 150 pixels/inch and the mode to Grayscale. After you’ve finished creating your ad, you need to save it as a .tif file.

For pictures, you’ll need to open the file that contains the image. Next, you’ll click on Image and then Image Size. In the Resolution box it will tell you how many pixels/inch your file is. If it is a color picture and the resolution is more than 200, you’ll need to change it to 200. For black and white pictures, it should be changed to 150. If it is less than 150, changing it to 150 will only make your picture blurry or fuzzy when it prints. However, if the size of your picture is much larger than size that it will print, it’s possible that when you scale it down in Pagemaker it will print clear. For example, my digital camera takes more pictures when it is set on a lower resolution, but the print size of the picture is 11 inches x 14 inches. In my publication, the picture is going to be sized down to 7 inches x 5 ½ inches. Even though the resolution of my picture is 72 pixels/inch, because I’m reducing it by 50 percent, it will print like it is around 150 pixels/inch, which is fine.