Can you send MS Word files to commercial printers?
I do get asked this question periodically. The simple answer, I’m afraid, is no.
It’s certainly possible to output a PDF (or PostScript file) from MS Word, but it presents several technical and aesthetic problems:
- MS Word just doesn’t handle fonts very well, compared to a proper DTP package, and lacks the fine-tuning controls. Your finished product is always gong to look like an office document, albeit on nicer paper
- The quality of images imported into MS Word gets degraded quite significantly. You’d probably be disappointed by what they’d look like on the finished product
- Word struggles with image formats such as TIFF and EPS
- The colour model of MS Word is RGB, whereas a printer needs the job in CMYK. There’s also no support for Pantone colours.
So, to summarise, unless you’re doing a simple black and white text-based project, don’t touch it with a bargepole. In fact, this blog post explains it much better than me.
I think the only possible exception would be an entirely text-based publication in black type (such as a novel), if you were self-publishing a book, for example. However, if you’ve set up your Word file properly, using Styles and Formatting, it wouldn’t be a big job for a designer to typeset it and it would look much nicer. And you’d need them to do your book cover anyway.
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