Amazon.com Review
This well-written, full-color guide from Adobe teaches managers and designers the relevant issues and problems that need to be considered with any professional-level print job. It helps weigh the benefits of doing particular tasks yourself against assigning them to a prepress professional. The first chapter describes color, print, and prepress terms; computer graphics; and various printing processes. Next, the guide explains how to construct a publication, teaching you about color-management systems, special printing techniques, color correction, registration, resolution, dot gain, scanning, duotones and tritones, and vector graphics. This section introduces you to image editing, interpolation, graphic file formats, type, and font formats. The third chapter discusses how to convert to Postscript, color proof, print via the Web, and archive files in PDF form. The final chapter focuses on project-management guidelines: you assess your budget, schedule, and other goals and consider prepress tasks, vendors, printers, page-layout files, and file-handoff checklists. Each chapter ends with a case study that explores the decision-making processes behind the production of an award-winning publication. An appendix provides a table of Postscript error messages, their meaning, and common solutions. A second appendix displays process-color charts, and a glossary of printing, desktop-publishing, and computer-graphics terms rounds out the book.
--Kathleen Caster
From the Back Cover
Official Adobe Print Publishing Guide explores the processes and issues involved in preparing color publications for reproduction on a commercial printing press -- a set of tasks known as the prepress process. Such tasks, previously only performed by skilled professionals, can now be accomplished by a wider range of people using the desktop. This book introduces the flexibility and direct control offered by this new technology and outlines the issues involved in preparing electronic files for commercial printing. It also gives information on when to perform a prepress task and when it is better to leave it in the hands of a prepress professional.