What are all of the paper weights and what do they actually mean?: Basic size & weights explained

August 21, 2009 by Brenda Bell · 2 Comments
Filed under: Educational, Paper

Have you ever wondered what exactly say an 80# text is and why is called 80#? It’s a topic that is often overlooked and often misunderstood. I even had someone tell me once that they thought the weight of paper meant how much pressure was applied to the paper when they made it. As you will see below, that is not true at all.

Simply put, the basis weight (a graphic arts term for the # number eg. 80#) is the actual weight of 500 sheets (a ream) of the basic sheet size. The basic sheet size depends on the grade of paper, so here is a listing of commonly used paper grades and their basic sheet sizes:

Paper Grade: Book (also called text)
Basic Sheet Size: 25 x 38

Paper Grade: Bond and Writing
Basic Sheet Size: 17″x 22″

Paper Grade: Cover
Basic Sheet Size: 20″ x 26″

Paper Grade: Tag
Basic Sheet Size: 24″ x 36″

Paper Grade: Index
Basic Sheet Size: 25.25″ x 30.5″

Referring to the list above you can see that our example of 80# text comes from the fact that 500 25″x38″ sheets actually weigh 80 pounds.

Tags: basic size, basis size, basis weight, bond, book, cover, index, paper grades, pounds of paper, tag, weights of paper, writing

Zipping your files

August 7, 2009 by Brenda Bell · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Educational, Internet/Web, Prepress, Technology

So, you have finished your artwork, collected your files for output and need to send them over the internet to us to produce. You could just attach them to an email one by one and go, however, if you do this, the fonts and any postscript files will likely corrupt in transfer. To protect your files from corruption and to save yourself the hassle of having to resubmit parts of your file and thereby risk delaying the project, just compress your files by zipping them before sending. Here’s how:

If you are on a MAC, you have it easy. Just highlight all of the files and/or folders you want to include in your zip folder, ctrl + click (right click if you have a mighty mouse or other 2 button mouse). This will bring up a submenu. Select the option “Create Archive of” (or on some versions of OS X it says “Create Compressed file of”). This will zip all of your files up into one file with a .zip extension.

If you are on a Windows based pc, you will have to download a simple third party program to create zipped file such as WinZip or FreeZip. Follow the simple on screen instructions to create your zip file.

If you are uploading your files to our FTP site, our site will automatically zip your files for you so your files will get to us in one piece.

If you want to unzip a file someone sent to you, just double click. Both Mac’s and Windows based pcs have a unzip utility built in.

Tags: compression, freezip, how to, mac, win zip, windows, zip

Exporting a Print ready PDF from Quark 8

August 5, 2009 by Brenda Bell · 2 Comments
Filed under: Design, Educational, Preflighting, Prepress

The procedure described below applies to QuarkXpress 8 for Mac. Other versions of the program work in a similar fashion.

Make sure you’ve saved your file before attempting to create a PDF. First, select the Export option in the File Menu:

A window similar to the one below appears:

Choose a destination for your PDF document, select PDF/X-1a: 2001 as your pdf style, then click the Options button to access settings in the PDF Export dialog box. We recommend using the preset designated PDF/X-1a: 2001 because this is a PDF standard that has been put together specifically for print PDFs.

An additional dialog box opens, which is filled with export settings. In the color section (shown in the above), make sure you create a composite PDF and specify to your job specs: CMYK, CYMK +spot, B&W, Grayscale or As Is if your
project is printing in just spot colors.

Next you will want to add crop marks and bleeds as shown in the following two screen shots: