Advertise With Dublin People Group

PDF’s should be PDF/X1 format (ISO standard). PDF/X is not an alternative to PDF, it’s a focused subset of PDF designed specifically for reliable prepress data interchange.

We recommend Acrobat Distiller V5 or > for PDF creation with

• ‘Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4)’ as the ‘Compatibility’ file option &
• PDF/X-1a as the ‘Compliance Standard’ with ‘’Cancel job’ set for – ‘When not compliant’.

Colour management settings:

• ‘ISOnewspaper26v4’* as the ‘CMYK Working Spaces’ profile CMYK colour with GCR
  * This colour profile can be downloaded here

Maximum total ink coverage = 240%

All fonts in the page design must be embedded in the PDF to ensure it appears after Ripping i.e. when printed.

We use Arkitex Grafix RIP (Harlequin RIP V7.2) and the following points should be noted when using Transparency, Recombine or Late

Colour management:

• Partial painting is not supported with transparency jobs.
• Text Knockout Mode is not supported.

Printability

For black hairline rules and fine text use solid black (100% black) as fine elements printed with 2, 3 or 4 colours composites are difficult to print to register and may result in blurriness.

Fine* reverse out type must be avoided (*12pt or less)

Large text over images / colour > 100% should be set to knockout to avoid the background colour coming through when printed.

Avoid creating colours with greater than 240% total ink coverage (the sum of the four process colours CMYK Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). Greater than 240% may prevent the ink drying correctly and result in set-off, where the ink from one sheet of paper is transferred to the next.

Tinted backgrounds should not be less than 8% to reproduce satisfactorily.

Tinted backgrounds should be no more than 50% to ensure readability of foreground text.

For uniform tints it is recommended to consider using less than 4 of the process colours CMYK

Selecting one or 2 process colours will give the most consistent results.