It's easy to look around at the world and see the fruit of professional graphic designers.
(I'm not one, just fyi)
It's also interesting to look around and see the number of different approaches to digital graphics problems. There are a lot of ways to bag your groceries, so to speak.
I work for a printer. It's common for novices to bring us posters to print which were made in Microsoft PowerPoint and which were converted to PDF. When someone says to me "I made it in PowerPoint" I wince inside a little bit and get prepared for things to shift around.
PDFs are not the "Portable Document Format" they want to be. They get better from time to time (also worse sometimes, but it's the same with everything) but the trouble with a standard is that not everyone will adopt it. Therefore Apple computers have one way of interpreting a PDF and Windows computers have a different way.
The big deal here is mostly with fonts (there are other things too, and that comes in a minute).
The first issue is that you might have a font on your computer which we don't have in the printshop. If that's the case, our computers either try to find that font or to substitute another one which might look similar. That's a kind of built in feature these days. Sometimes the computer will just assume you want to substitute a font, and so if it does that we will never know that you wanted SkagWorks Bold, because when we see it it will just be Arial.
For example, Times New Roman (TNR) looks basically the same whether it's on a Mac or on a PC, but the way it's coded in the OS is different. For that reason saving a PDF on one machine doesn't mean it will work correctly on the opposite architecture. It may be perfect, close, or totally wrong.
For a printer, hitting "SAVE" and walking away won't get you where you need to go. It might be close and that might be fine, or it might be just enough off that it ruins your day. Sometimes it will just print as an empty square. If my computer doesn't have the piece of code which properly renders a cedilla (ç) then it will just print a box, or nothing.
It's not quite that simple, naturally, but that's the gist of it. Not including the font code in your PDF makes it smaller, and more "portable," while getting around the licensing issue. Printers and media people probably license their fonts, or they pay for software which includes a font license. My grandpa, who just wants a recipe off the internet to print correctly and really doesn't care whether Tahoma Grande Oblique prints with or without flourishes, just wants to be able to use the document. So his system substitutes a font with that name, or if that name isn't available, another font which might look close to that one. His problem is solved, but ours is just beginning.
So, unless you're trying to get exactly what you designed on your screen on to a sheet of paper or canvas, you're done. Here is where we encounter the intersection of widespread usability and tailored/custom/professional tool and outcome intent. If you're being particular though, there are some things you can do to get exactly what you intend out of your print system.
Well, you can either just save your document as an image or you can save your document as a format which includes the fonts, or at least the reference set which allows any suitable computing system to tell exactly what you meant and where all the elements are going to go.
Images...
Saving as an image is kind of a last resort. Images are big, size wise, and saving an image so that it doesn't lose detail is kind of an art. However, it works if you do it right, because at least on a large-format latex printer, what you are getting at the end is a bunch of dots. They're very close to each other and maybe as high a resolution as 1200 dpi, but they're just dots and it's difficult to see anything but a nice, crisp line from any distance past a foot or so. If you have problems with fonts, or maybe there's just something in the file which doesn't work, save as an image.
If you're going to save as an image, don't use a JPEG unless you have serious bandwidth or printer throttling issues; use a TIFF or PSD, and leave the image uncompressed. Compression will always degrade quality, and while you might not notice that degradation on screen, you will almost certainly notice it on a print.
You can also use a PNG or BMP if you have to, because they are pretty close to the output format of the printer, but they tend to be big for no reason, and they also don't really carry color information very well. If in doubt, save as a TIFF.
Packaged Adobe InDesign files...
We LOVE packaged InDesign files. They include all the stuff we need. They have the pictures at their full resolution and they have the actual files the fonts are rendered from. In a perfect world, that is all we would get to print, and it's all we would accept. We could save a PDF or image to print from using our InDesign and our print settings and give you exactly, perfectly, what you are looking for.
PDFs
Of course, not everyone has InDesign. So, if you can, just always save as a PDF. PDFs retain vector information, color manage well, and are usually the smallest. The problem though, is that they're not just a picture, so some parts of the files need to be licensed or included.
PDFs have their own problems, mostly still related to program and OS architectures. See the PowerPoint section below for some more information, but in particular the ways the OS renders transparencies can be problematic. We need to save a PDF in a way which maintains the visual and content appearances of the document, and believe it or not, software designers are on top of it, at least as much as they can be.
We want either a PDF-A ("Archive quality"), or ideally a PDF-X (which is designed for being printed). Some software will let you save it this way, and some will not.
Saving as a PDF-A is a kind of good thing even if you won't have your PDF printed. It saves everything in the file in a way that is intended to make all of the information work even if you are running a stripped down computer with minimal resources. The "Archive" designation means that it tries to make the PDF as complete as possible, and unreliant on the vagaries of future machines (or contemporary machines which don't match your own machine's configuration).
What PDF-A does, in essence, is it saves everything that a guest computer will need to render that PDF document correctly in, say, ideally, 20 years. It saves pertinent information in architecture-independent forms and it saves the photos you inserted in the highest possible resolution. It tries to make your file last, and to be perfect when it gets to its recipient.
Either way, a PDF-A is a good way to get all your information from one place to another, pretty much regardless what kind of computer it gets used on last.
For printing, this is a good thing.
Why, Powerpoint? Oh Why?
Why does PowerPoint not convert happily into a PDF like other programs (sometimes) do? You'd have to ask Microsoft, because in the end it's complicated. But not complicated in other ways.
Well, I still want to use PowerPoint (or It's All I Have)...
There are some things to look out for when you save your PowerPoint document as a poster.
(I'm not one, just fyi)
It's also interesting to look around and see the number of different approaches to digital graphics problems. There are a lot of ways to bag your groceries, so to speak.
I work for a printer. It's common for novices to bring us posters to print which were made in Microsoft PowerPoint and which were converted to PDF. When someone says to me "I made it in PowerPoint" I wince inside a little bit and get prepared for things to shift around.
PDFs are not the "Portable Document Format" they want to be. They get better from time to time (also worse sometimes, but it's the same with everything) but the trouble with a standard is that not everyone will adopt it. Therefore Apple computers have one way of interpreting a PDF and Windows computers have a different way.
So? Fonts? I have them!
The first issue is that you might have a font on your computer which we don't have in the printshop. If that's the case, our computers either try to find that font or to substitute another one which might look similar. That's a kind of built in feature these days. Sometimes the computer will just assume you want to substitute a font, and so if it does that we will never know that you wanted SkagWorks Bold, because when we see it it will just be Arial.
For example, Times New Roman (TNR) looks basically the same whether it's on a Mac or on a PC, but the way it's coded in the OS is different. For that reason saving a PDF on one machine doesn't mean it will work correctly on the opposite architecture. It may be perfect, close, or totally wrong.
For a printer, hitting "SAVE" and walking away won't get you where you need to go. It might be close and that might be fine, or it might be just enough off that it ruins your day. Sometimes it will just print as an empty square. If my computer doesn't have the piece of code which properly renders a cedilla (ç) then it will just print a box, or nothing.
There's some history here, which is kind of interesting; why won't a font just get saved into your file? Why doesn't it just say, here are some pixels, put them in the right place?
Well, there are a couple reasons. One, fonts are big groups of code. They make a file bigger. One way computer geniuses have figured out to reduce file size (bloat) is to leave out the font. Many fonts already reside on your computer.
The second reason is because someone probably owns that font. They own the code that displays that font. They may own also the visual depiction of the font set. So, in essence, a long time ago software companies basically agreed that they would not include the actual code for the font in the file they created unless they were sure someone paid a licensing fee for that font.
A third reason is that Windows and Apple computers actually have different ways to coding the fonts and so it's a lot easier to just say "Use TNR Here" than it is to include a shunt to get the Apple computer to read a Windows font code line and vice versa. See reason one: reduce bloat by reducing unnecessary code. Just include a reference! ...and make it a short reference, or else we might as well just include the font set! :DSo, we're back to the reference, and your computer will read that reference and stick a font from your system into the appropriate place. The only time you can use that font is if you have paid for it (or stolen it, but please don't--the paycheck you save may be your own). You're leasing the use of it. You bought your computer, or maybe you didn't, but either way the OS includes some fonts. Most of the time this substitution will happen without anyone being the wiser. If you don't have that font on your system, it makes a substitution, sometimes by asking, and sometimes just on the fly.
It's not quite that simple, naturally, but that's the gist of it. Not including the font code in your PDF makes it smaller, and more "portable," while getting around the licensing issue. Printers and media people probably license their fonts, or they pay for software which includes a font license. My grandpa, who just wants a recipe off the internet to print correctly and really doesn't care whether Tahoma Grande Oblique prints with or without flourishes, just wants to be able to use the document. So his system substitutes a font with that name, or if that name isn't available, another font which might look close to that one. His problem is solved, but ours is just beginning.
So, unless you're trying to get exactly what you designed on your screen on to a sheet of paper or canvas, you're done. Here is where we encounter the intersection of widespread usability and tailored/custom/professional tool and outcome intent. If you're being particular though, there are some things you can do to get exactly what you intend out of your print system.
Now what?
Images...
If you're going to save as an image, don't use a JPEG unless you have serious bandwidth or printer throttling issues; use a TIFF or PSD, and leave the image uncompressed. Compression will always degrade quality, and while you might not notice that degradation on screen, you will almost certainly notice it on a print.
You can also use a PNG or BMP if you have to, because they are pretty close to the output format of the printer, but they tend to be big for no reason, and they also don't really carry color information very well. If in doubt, save as a TIFF.
Packaged Adobe InDesign files...
We LOVE packaged InDesign files. They include all the stuff we need. They have the pictures at their full resolution and they have the actual files the fonts are rendered from. In a perfect world, that is all we would get to print, and it's all we would accept. We could save a PDF or image to print from using our InDesign and our print settings and give you exactly, perfectly, what you are looking for.
PDFs
Of course, not everyone has InDesign. So, if you can, just always save as a PDF. PDFs retain vector information, color manage well, and are usually the smallest. The problem though, is that they're not just a picture, so some parts of the files need to be licensed or included.
PDFs have their own problems, mostly still related to program and OS architectures. See the PowerPoint section below for some more information, but in particular the ways the OS renders transparencies can be problematic. We need to save a PDF in a way which maintains the visual and content appearances of the document, and believe it or not, software designers are on top of it, at least as much as they can be.
We want either a PDF-A ("Archive quality"), or ideally a PDF-X (which is designed for being printed). Some software will let you save it this way, and some will not.
Saving as a PDF-A is a kind of good thing even if you won't have your PDF printed. It saves everything in the file in a way that is intended to make all of the information work even if you are running a stripped down computer with minimal resources. The "Archive" designation means that it tries to make the PDF as complete as possible, and unreliant on the vagaries of future machines (or contemporary machines which don't match your own machine's configuration).
What PDF-A does, in essence, is it saves everything that a guest computer will need to render that PDF document correctly in, say, ideally, 20 years. It saves pertinent information in architecture-independent forms and it saves the photos you inserted in the highest possible resolution. It tries to make your file last, and to be perfect when it gets to its recipient.
Either way, a PDF-A is a good way to get all your information from one place to another, pretty much regardless what kind of computer it gets used on last.
For printing, this is a good thing.
Why, Powerpoint? Oh Why?
PowerPoint basically draws like an old traditional CRT screen draws. It draws in lines, from the top down. It's designed for use on projectors and screens, so it does everything based on proportion of the whole screen. That way it doesn't look too funky if you go from a square projector to a rectangular projector on your sales route. (PowerPoint engineers could correct me on this, but from my deduction, this is how it works)
Printing something doesn't map the entire space and then squeeze something into it. Your printer, your RIP software, wants to know where to put a dot of ink. It's measuring out exact spatial places. Saying 40% of 60" horizontal and 14.355567" of 19.445% vertical is an inefficient way to map out coordinates on a printer. Imagine Jackson Pollack in an alternate universe as a pointillist; a very careful, very fast pointillist.
Then we get back to fonts. Most newer versions of PowerPoint have an options button which pops up when you select Save As PDF. In that options panel it will sometimes mention PDF-A and sometimes just mention something about making a PDF archivable. Absent this option, you are tossing a bunch of element salad into a pretty big container and hoping that it doesn't get scrambled too much between your computer and our printer.
Well, I still want to use PowerPoint (or It's All I Have)...
- Did you make it the right size to begin with?
- Every month someone comes in with an 8.5x11" poster and asks if we can blow it up to 56x20. The answer is no. No, we can't do that. And now you have to go back in and resize all your elements manually, because you started off so small. Check your document size in the beginning.
- Also, proportion is not magic. If we stretch it (we won't) it would look weird, our business would look sloppy, and repeat business would dwindle. Not happening.
- Did you insert pictures at the largest sizes possible?
- Did you cover anything up when you thought of a better design?
- Better go back and delete it now, because the PDF doesn't know that what's in front of it isn't supposed to be a transparency. We once had a poster on which a graph was superimposed on a repeating series of carats and the letter "c." The person was really wondering why CTRL+C wasn't copying something... well, somehow they were capturing the keyboard instead of operating a command. Dunno how. Anyway.
- Did you check your PDF after you saved it to make sure there are no errors?
This is a Long Post...
It's true. It's a lot to read. And there's a lot more to all of this. If you have questions, I'd like to encourage you to Google "Color Management" and "PDF Standards" and have a read. You'll quickly realize how MUCH information is out there, and how even small details can have a big impact on your finished product.
You might also give Adobe a call, and tell them that Photoshop and InDesign are a little bit too high powered for users who just want to toss things onto a sheet and make a poster out of it. If they hear enough feedback in that regard, you might end up with a piece of software which prints great and also works on a projector in your boardroom.
Toodles!
