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Colour or black & white printing whether large format or laser invariably involves printing of text, vector shapes, and images. In the world of postscript printing, each of these elements are handled by the printer differently. For example, if a font is missing, a document will still print, but the font replacing the missing font may be Courier. A vector shape with colour is usually handled by a printer without much trouble except for very complex shapes. A standard nightmare for printers is a file with thousands of polygon nodes coming out of CAD programs. What appears to be a small file is in fact an enormous spool file when it hits the printer. If you can just imagine that all printing involves converting text, shapes, and images into a matrix of four colour dots-millions of dots. What we see as an angled line or some text is in fact a pattern of dots. The matrix has to be constructed by the printer driver or raster image processor (RIP). Hence the spool file can grow to an enormous size depending on the complexity of shapes and fills. Images when printed are made up of very varying colour blocks called pixels. Images from a scanner become files made up of information about pixels. Each pixel has its own colour. Dots per inch is the term used to refer to how much information there is per inch. When printing, an important factor is the resolution of the image-there must be a minimum amount of data without which ‘jaggies’ appear. This stair-casing occurs because the printer resolution is greater than the resolution of the image file. So the print industry have set up guidelines for image resolution in order to eliminate the jaggy appearance of angled lines or shapes. See below for minimum requirements.
So how does a MSWord file get printed? Usually with good luck because MSWord as a very popular software only recognizes RGB colour or red-green-blue. The printer driver does the behind the scenes conversion of RGB to CMYK, and a lot of time not very well, except for vector shape and text. Because all printing must go through a conversion process, we at Brisbane Colour Bureau never print a MSWord file from MSWord. Specialised software is used to more accurately manage colour prior to printing. To help customers get the best quality colour print, we have compiled a list of guidelines: If choosing colours in non-RGB only programs, stick to one colour mode
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Ground Floor 360 Queen Street Brisbane Qld Ph (07) 3229 6044 |
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