I’m not the world’s best commentator, so you’ll have to forgive me. If you’re interested, the video was created using a very handy bit of software called CamStudio (from camstudio.org) and uploaded onto Veoh.com (whose quality appears to be better than YouTube’s). As always, comments are welcome.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Here are some screen captures to show the options you may need to change when your making your PostScript file for PDFing. Click on the first image to start the slideshow and press ‘next’ to advance.

Note: As the commentary on crop marks was admittedly a bit sketchy, you may wish to read this post.

Your choices of binding are going to depend on how many pages you have, what your budget is, the longevity of your publication and any special considerations.

Folding

Well okay, this is kind of obvious, but it is cheap and the printers can do all the folding mechanically. I’ve published four-page and six-page A4 publications in this manner, and a smaller folded leaflet could stretch to eight or ten pages.

Saddle stitching

For small-to-medium sized books such as reports, this is the option you’re most likely to use. Saddle stitching is essentially a fancier version of stapling. This is also pretty cheap and quick to do – how many pages you’ll be able to bind will depend on the weight of paper and is really a question to ask the printer. I’ve personally published 20,000 word reports over 48 pages using this method. Covers can also be done fairly simply – there isn’t much of an issue with spines and the front and back covers can go on the first and last pages of your QuarkXPress document.

One issue I have had with saddle-stitched books is creep – printers will typically trim books after folding them and the outside pages typically don’t extend as far as the inside ones. This was really only a problem because there was a graphic element on the outside edges of all the book pages and it led to slight variations in width. Again, this is a question for your printer.

Perfect binding

This is basically adhesive binding with a spine, common on paperback books for example. You’ll need to use this for thicker books that can’t be saddle stitched. In my experience this does add to a printer’s turnaround time, so you’ll have to factor that into your schedule. In addition, you or your designer will have to put together a cover with enough width to form the spine. The width of the spine is again a question to ask your printer.

Other options

This is the point in the discussion when representatives from printers get their briefcases out and effect a wry smile. Comb or wire binding is an alternative to perfect binding and allows a pubication to be laid out flat. It’s not particularly expensive, but I’ve found it takes printers quite a while to do. I’ve also seen hybrid varieties of this that allow you to incorporate a spine.

Hardback binding is pretty expensive and unlikely to come up often (bearing in mind that if you’re reading this website, you’re probably producing publications on the cheap). The cheapest variant of it is casebound binding, where the first page of the book block is glued to the inside of the hardback cover (a bit like those comic book annuals you may remember from childhood). However, you’re going to have to do a fairly hefty print-run to make this cost-effective.

Here are some things to bear in mind.

Your printer is your friend

Printers are always touting for work, so use this to your advantage. By this, I mean you can get representatives to visit your office to discuss specifications and paper stocks, get them to put together mock-ups of projects and ask for assistance with your technical settings, such as PDF output and bleed.

Also, what goes around comes around. The people in the print room will appreciate it if you send hassle-free jobs. If there isn’t a binding deadline on a job let them know, as it will help them plan their schedules more effectively. Save up some favours for when you genuinely are in a hole and you need genuine help with a tight deadline or a sudden change in the job specs.

More than one way to skin a cat

There are realistically three options around how you send a job. This is dependent on which version of Quark you’re running.

Send native Quark files

Here, you use QuarkXPress’s Collect for Output feature, which will output native files with all appropriate images, illustrations, fonts and Xtensions. This was the usual option years ago and it can still be done, but bear in mind the following:

• It’s probably the most time-consuming option
• Your printer may charge you extra to process the files
• If you’re using a PC and your printer is Mac based, there is the possiblity of incompatibilities
• You may end up with several very large files, which may be too big to email or take a very long time to upload to a printer’s FTP site, if they have one. You may possibly have to put the job on a CD and physically send it to the printers.

Having said that, if your volumes are fairly low and your jobs are simple and predictable, it’s still an option.

Use Quark’s PDF generator

I think this feature first appeared in version 6.0. Now, I personally avoided for several reasons – I already had Adobe Acrobat, I’d heard indifferent things about it and one of my printers warned me it had caused problems for them.

Having said that, I have heard that this capability has improved somewhat in version 7. My honest answer is that I don’t know – my recommendation would be to check out some discussion boards and ask your printers what their experiences have been. Maybe someone will post a comment below. (Note: I posted this question on Planet Quark, who provided a helpful reply. Again, it’s something to check with your printer.)

Use Adobe Acrobat

This is my preferred option – the ubiquity of PDFs means that it’s a very difficult program to do without anyway. It also gives you a lot more control over the outputted job, has several useful features for optimising publications for the web and several useful file conversion options.

I personally use Quark to generate PostScript files, then distill them to PDFs using preloaded settings sent to me by my printers. It works well for me and I’ll go into more detail in later posts, but it’s not the only way to do it.

Paper and colour

Paper stocks, weights, coating and binding options are best discussed with your printer. If you’re spending enough money, you may even get a free lunch into the bargain.

Colour takes a lot more thought. The most likely options for printing are one, two and four-colour.

One-colour printing

This is almost always going to be black ink, and therefore one plate at the printers, so the cheapeast option. It’s also technically the least difficult. If you’re only ever giong to print in black and white, then it’s unlikely you’ll actually need to buy any expensive desktop publishing software at all – you could probably manage with your copy of (gulp) Microsoft Publisher that comes with Microsoft Office and send the jobs as PDFs.

Two-colour printing

My preferred option for standard publications. This is realistically black plus a single Pantone colour (although other spot colour models are available). I think, done well, two-colour printing greatly adds to the visual appeal of bog-standard publications and is worth the extra money over one-colour printing. Or a two-colour cover can brighten up a book with only black insides.

Two-colour work is also the most technically fiddly in my experience – especially if you’re bringing in photos and illustrations from other programmes – although later tutorials will give suggestions to try and make it as painless as possible.

Four-colour printing

Full colour – cyan, magenta, yellow and black plates. Nice, of course, but also the most expensive.

Realistically, you’re going to want to confine full-colour to things such as leaflets, brochures and newsletters, along with book and document covers. Remember, there’s nothing to show off your design ability (or lack of) like filling a page with colour.

It’s certainly possible to output a PDF (or PostScript file) from MS Word, but it presents several technical and aesthetic problems:

1. 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
2. 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
3. Word struggles with image formats such as TIFF and EPS
4. 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.