Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications

Book excerpt: Contrary to popular belief, print is not dead! With all the interest in online publishing here in the 21st century, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that information is still widely disseminated through the good old medium of print. The advent of desktop publishing granted new levels of power and control to the layout artist and graphic designer, but it hasn’t made the process of getting the perfect print foolproof. Sometimes managing the disparate elements of fonts, images, colors, and more, while dealing with the quirks of page-layout applications makes even the bravest designer and production editor long for the hands-on days of moveable type. Creating a great layout on your monitor is only half the battle; how do you make it work on paper? Print production expert Claudia McCue takes on the challenge of putting ink to paper, offering clear, authoritative guidance to print professionals and anyone else who has been frustrated by the obstacles of getting electronic documents to print perfectly. This new edition of Claudia’s classic book is now fully Adobe-centric, and shows readers how to use the different applications in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 together to create and produce great print documents. Use Photoshop and Illustrator to create raster and vector images, and combine them with text in InDesign to create eye-catching yet readable page layouts. Learn the ins and outs of fonts, and gain a better understanding of how ink and paper work together. Finally, “prefilight” or prepare your job for submission to a printer to make sure the printing process goes off without a hitch.