File Specifications

Bleed and Printing ?

A common mistake with files being supplied is them having no bleed. What do we mean? Bleed is the area around the job that is printed and then trimmed off. At Print Solutions we require 3mm. So as you can see in the diagram below of a 90 x 55 mm business card the blue outside box is 3mm further out from the artwork box. ALL artwork to be supplied to NCPS must have 3mm bleed for both offset and digital printing. If not it will either have to be resupplied or we may sometimes be able to edit your file which will be charged at $88 per hour.

File Formats for Printing

The following print formats will give optimal results for offset printing.

PDF (Portable Document Format) is an industry standard for the printing industry. When exporting from your program use Press Quality setting (or similar high resolution setting) and turn on trim marks and put 3 mm of bleed on the job. This is so we can cut your job to size and avoid any white around the edge. If your document uses any fonts we might not have these can be embedded but it may be wise to convert all to outlines or curves so we can make adjustments to your file if needed. eg colour changes.

Click here to Download a Adobe Acrobat Distiller Job Options file for NCPS>>

We can also print from Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign. All files supplied should be in CMYK colour space and have fonts converted to outlines or curves. Document need to be set up with 3 mm of bleed and all links eg. images and illustrations and need to be embedded or supplied as well as the file. You can also supply fonts (We use windows at NCPS and some Mac fonts will not be used in which case they can be converted to outlines/curves).

Generic files formats such as EPS, TIFF and JPEG’s are also accepted. These need to have 3mm of bleed all the way round. Example- A document set to be trimmed to A4 (297x210mm) should be set to 303x216mm. TIFF and JPEG need to be saved at 300 dpi. Photoshop (same as above).

The following files can give unexpected results for offset printing. We can print from word and publisher but these files are not specific design software and results vary. You can print to a PDF from these programs and we suggest thats what you supply us as we will charge to convert the file to use it in our work flow.

Files not supplied to above specs will incur an artwork charge to ready your files for our workflow. These are charged at $88 an hour.

Click here to download our offset specs>>

Xerox Digital Printing

All of the above file formats are applicable to Digital Printing also and in the case of setting up a job for digital printing please dont put text any closer to your pages edge than 5mm. Borders are also problematic for digital printing as sheet registration is not that of offset and when cut produces undesirable results. For this reason jobs supplied with borders or text closer than 5mm to page edge will be sent back to be resupplied to fit specs or artwork fees will be charges to ready the file for digital printing.