Moving from desktop printing to the world of professional print services can seem a daunting transition—but have no fear!
Serif Print Resources is designed with useful information and colorful illustrations to help you achieve the best possible results when you professionally print your publication.

A mistake when preparing files for professional printing can end up being quite costly, so it’s worth understanding as much
of the process as possible ahead of time to minimize the chance of problems.

For example, when employing professional print services you’ll want to ensure that the colors in your finished product will correspond to those displayed on your monitor or printed from your desktop printer in order to to avoid unnecessary disappointment. When designing for your desktop printer, you can simply print a test job yourself at any time and make appropriate adjustments to get the desired result. When dealing with a professional print provider, however, you may not see any color matching issues until you receive your finished job, or perhaps an early proof copy at extra cost, so it is wise to be well informed!

We'll cover such topics as color management in this online guide so that you don't suffer common pitfalls! You can use the Previous and Next links at the bottom of each page to navigate through the guide in a straightforward sequence, or choose a topic from the list below:

• The main methods of producing output for professional printing

• Popular professional printing processes

• The concepts and terminology of color reproduction

• Design tips to minimize the risk of production problems

• Paper types and paper-related issues

• Output issues including a "preflight" checklist

• The most important information summarized - Frequently Asked Questions

There are myriad ways you can prepare a design for professional printing... here's a summary of some popular methods:

  Using desktop publishing software, such as Serif's PagePlus 11, to create your design and output it as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file for submitting to a professional print service. The file can be written to CD and mailed or simply uploaded to a print provider to fulfil your printing needs. PDF files from a program like PagePlus will contain accurate layout information plus all of your text, artwork, images, fonts, inking and color information and more besides, so they are increasingly trusted for reliable professional printing.

  Use other software and output your design in PostScript™ format. PostScript is a well-recognized printing format that is being superseded by more modern PDF files. The focus of this guide as far as output is concerned, though, is the creation of PDFs. PostScript™ output is possible from most software by printing to a PostScript printer driver which has been set to "print to file", resulting in one or more ".ps" files that can be sent to a printer. Sometimes PostScript can be created as a single file like a PDF containing all colours, fonts, text and images with an accurate layout, but this typically necessitates an expensive professional design program, and PDF is still favoured because of more reliable results.

  Submit a native document to a professional printer. If you have not used Serif PagePlus or another PDF-friendly program to design your artwork and are not confident in creating a standard PostScript file, you can ask your chosen professional printer whether or not they can accept your design in its original format. If they agree to accept the file, you are likely to need to manually include fonts and images alongside the file when you submit it to the professional printer. This is also becoming a less favoured method as it is often problematic and also requires that the print shop operates quite a wide range of programs.

As mentioned, we'll be quoting the creation of PDF files as a route to pro printing, and will use Serif PagePlus 11 as an example of an affordable desktop publishing program suited to the task. Next in the learning sequence is an introduction to different print technologies—something you'll definitely need to know; many professional printers will offer a choice of output methods, each of which has pros and cons.