What You Need to Know About Printing

What you don’t know can cost you dearly. This article is the first in a series designed to help you avoid mistakes that can run up printing bills, set your job back by days or weeks, or force you trash your first effort and start over again. Take my word for it, disasters like that happen every day.

The printing industry is complicated and varied. There are first-class educational institutions offering four-year degrees in it. We can only cover the essentials here–just enough to keep you out of trouble most of the time.

Printing techniques

Letterpress is technique that Gutenberg used 500 years ago, and so did just about everybody else until the early 1970s. It is printing from a raised surface, like a rubber stamp. Most of the printing in the last hundred years was from cast metal type and engravings. Today, letterpress is sometimes used low-quality business jobs or die cutting – an ignominious end to a glorious history. Letterpress produced some beautiful printing in its heyday but the presses were too slow to compete with offset and the prep work was too costly. Flat-bed letterpresses ran at less than one-fifth of the speed of modern offset presses.

TIP: Most raised-letter business cards and invitations, including wedding invitations, are printed by trade specialty houses. Your lettershop adds a 100 percent markup to these jobs but does no work other than writing the order. Dozens of these specialty houses advertise in Graphic Arts Monthly and American Printer. Most accept orders from customers whose letterheads suggest printing or a related field.

Flexography is a variation on the letterpress theme. It prints from wrap-around rubber or photopolymer plastic plates with raised printing surfaces. It is used extensively on packages, especially printing on plastic wraps and in forms printing. It is also used for some book and journal printing.

Gravure is a type of intaglio printing in which the ink is held in “wells” or grooves cut into the plate surface. It is the opposite of letterpress. Most Sunday supplements of major newspapers are printed on rotary gravure (or rotogravure) presses. The ink coverage–especially for color illustrations– is very good, but type looks ragged. The plates are very expensive to produce and the chemicals are hazardous. Gravure is impractical for short-run work; most runs are several hundred thousand copies or more.

Screen printing is a method in which ink is forced through a stenciled fabric screen. It is used for T-shirts, posters, coffee cups, displays and a variety of other materials. Solid colors print very well but small type does not. Artists call this technique serigraphy.

Offset lithography (also called photo-offset or offset) is the most popular technique in use in the United States and most of the industrialized world today. It takes its name from the printing stones that were used to reproduce artwork for centuries. Currier and Ives are probably the best known examples of that technique. Artists drew with oil-based crayons on polished limestone slabs, applied water, then applied oil-based inks. The water was repelled by the crayon and, in turn, repelled the ink. You get the idea. Today flexible metal or paper “plates” are exposed photographically which chemically separates image from non-image areas. The water repelling grease principle is the same, however. The presses have a series of rollers and a water (sometimes, alcohol and water) fountain solution.* Ink is applied to the plate and the image is “offset” to a rubber blanket which transfers the image to the paper. Many modern sheet-fed offset presses can print more than 10,000 impressions per hour.

The basic technique is the same for high-speed offset web presses that turn out more than 30,000 full-color magazine sections an hour, quality offset sheet-fed presses, or the “duplicators” at the local quick print shop. There are major differences in quality, however, as well as major differences in the way you prepare your work. We will discuss these differences in a bit.

Sheet-fed offset

Chances are most of your work will be done in this medium. In the United States, the presses range in size from units that can print two 8½ × 11-in. pages to presses four times that size. and the presses can be single-color, two-color, perfecting (printing both sides at the same time), four- or five-color. There are lots of variations in-between. Paper for metric-based presses has a narrower width-to-height ratio.

Don’t be afraid to ask for suggestions on how to cut costs –different paper, different size, different design or use of color. Ask for only one estimate from any printer after you settle on the most cost effective solution. Most printers hate calculating multiple variations on a theme. Their goodwill can save you money.

Get to know your printer’s capabilities and study samples produced at that shop. You will save money if you find a printer with the most efficient configuration for your job. For example, if you print short-run 4-page newsletters, you will want a printer with smaller presses. Printers specializing in big work could do the job, but usually a printer used to working on short runs would be less expensive.

Larger presses can be used efficiently on small jobs, however. Jobs can be ganged–several jobs can be printed at the same time on the same sheet and cut apart; or stepped–ganged with repeat images of the same job; or printed work-and-turn–both front and back printed on the same side, then the paper is turned over to back up the front. The press operator has to spend a little time registering the sheet, but work and turn saves exposing and mounting a second plate.

Duplicators vs. “Real Presses”

Here is the difference between adults and children. The presses you see across the counter at your local quick printer and “real” offset printing presses. They use ink, plates, a transfer blanket and a water dampening system just like their big brothers at the million dollar printing plant in the industrial park. The differences are not necessarily size.

Most of the larger presses use packing–layers of paper under the plate or blanket to ensure a perfect impression during printing. Smaller presses use a spring system to keep “consistent” pressure. In the trade, the two types of presses are called bearer and non-bearer presses.

The larger presses have more rollers to transfer ink to the plate. That means they can print bigger areas of solid colors. Presses with fewer rollers do not handle large ink areas well although they do a reasonably good job printing text.

The paper feed system on larger presses is more exact. You can expect those presses to print second colors within one dot row (less than 1/100th on an inch) whereas presses common in quick print shops cannot print second colors tightly together. Printers call that registration: you’ve seen the crosshairs printed along with color bars on tuck-away flaps on food cartons.

Often, the quick print shops use paper plates, usually exposed one-step on a camera rather than burned from a negative.

The smaller presses used by quick printers cannot produce halftones finer than 100 lines per inch, and work best at 85 lines per inch.

Saving money

Here is what you can save, and what you sacrifice. Short-run, medium-quality printing is much less expensive when run on the smaller presses because there is less make-ready, the equipment is less expensive and the employees are usually paid at a lower rate.

But don’t expect:

Solid inked areas. Even a one-half inch color bar across the sheet is too much for these presses.
Sharp photographs. Sometimes, there is nothing wrong with an 85-line halftone on colored text paper. Sometimes there is.
Bleeds. Duplicator shops rarely trim paper. It is unpacked as 8½ × 11 stock, it is printed as 8½ × 11 stock and it is delivered to you as 8½ × 11 stock. You must keep all type and art away each edge by at least three-eights of an inch. Sometimes you will see color streaking or press marks on the edge of the sheet.
Coated stock. Small presses do not print coated papers well, but you can choose from a good range of white and colored offset and text paper as well as index card stock, carbonless forms paper and envelopes. The presses can print on US postcards, but not all quick printers are good at it.
Larger sizes. Generally, the small presses print 8½ × 11, 8½ × 14, or 11 × 17-inch stock.

On the other hand, these small presses can cut your printing bill in half. Here are four more tips:

Segregate your work. Split the work between your commercial printer and the neighborhood quick printer unless you get a really good deal from your commercial printer for the small work. Sometimes, the commercial printer will price the quick and dirty jobs at a loss to keep all of your work. Sometimes, the printer would rather you took those “trash” jobs to the competition.
Inspect your layouts for features you can change – eliminate blocks of solids, avoid bleeds, use line art rather than photos, etc.
Design with the printer’s capabilities in mind. First, find out what the quick printer can do easily and efficiently.
There is no need to spend the extra bucks on negatives when using a quick printer. Most quick printers use a one-step paper plate that skips the negative step. In fact, copy from laser printers–even 300 d.p.i. lasers–usually produce acceptable results. And you can paste in artwork, if you like. You don’t have to scan the art or use electronic clipart.

Newspaper webs

There are thousands of weekly newspapers in this country. Most are printed on low-quality newspaper webs. Web presses print from rolls of paper rather than pre-cut sheets. The webs are gathered and cut, and possibly glued or stapled, at the end of the press. These presses are fast – up to 30,000 impressions an hour. They can print color but do not expect great registration or quality. You are limited to 85-line screen halftones on newsprint and 100-line screen halftones on regular finish offset stock. Many of them can print a double standard 14-in. newspaper page or an 8-in catalog page and many variations in-between. (Recently, we printed several 40-page, two-color catalogs on them at about half the cost of a comparable job on sheet-fed. The press runs were 14,000 copies.) Some newspaper webs can be competitive with sheet-fed down to 5,000 copies but you will really see savings when you pass that 10,000-copy level.

Always learn as much about the printer’s capabilities before you start the job. That rule is especially true with newspaper web plants. Ask for a tour, watch the presses operating and gather samples, lots and lots of samples.

Like other webs, the presses are perfecting. One unit prints the back of the sheet while another prints the front and another prints spot color on one side, etc. The press operators can change the press configuration to suit your job.

The webs require more trim so you will have to make much larger margins. One might think that a 35-in. web could produce four 8½-in. pages. It cannot. Redesign the work to fit into a 8¼-in. page.

Magazine webs

This is the big league when compared to the home talent newspaper webs. A standard press might consist of 10 units–one unit for each of the process colors on each side plus units to add spot color. These webs can print 16-page units of an 8½ × 11 (or larger) magazine. That is eight pages on each side of the sheet. Many can print those colorful grocery store ad supplements tucked into your daily paper. There are smaller units, called half webs, that print four pages on each side. Magazine webs print on coated stock but usually lighter weight than used in sheet-fed presses. They can print beautiful color.

But there is a problem with finished size. Most will trim closer to 8 × 10¾-in. than 8½ × 11. Getting the extra fraction of an inch would require a wider web and higher cost.

Envelopes

If you plan to print several thousand envelopes, or if you print them in several colors or print both front and back, you might consider using an envelope manufacturer or converter. Instead printing finished envelopes, a converter makes envelopes out of a printed sheet. Sometimes the converter does the printing as well. That can save big bucks, especially for direct mail campaigns. Call the converter or envelope manufacturer before you call your printer.

Files have replaced "camera-ready"

Not too many years ago most work brought to a printer was camera-ready, that is, pasted on a board to be shot for negative. Usually, halftones were shot separately, and stripped onto the line negatives. Desktop publishing reduced that practice. Now, most printers accept computer files. In fact, many job shops use scanners to process camera-ready work. Check with the printer before you bring in your job.

Customs

Printing is an industry that has rules that mystify those new to it. The rules are called “Trade Customs.” Printing, like the building industry, performs custom work for clients. Each product is unique. Print buyers are often surprised by the rules. For example, they may learn that they have to pay for the press over run when the printer prints too many copies. Or, they have to buy litho negatives when they thought they already paid for them. The rules are strange but the hold up in court. Know the rules before asking for a quotation, and specify variances when you type the job specifications.

*/ Some of newest offset presses are “waterless,” but the prep work prior to press has not changed.

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