Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. Pre-setup Questions
The following three questions help you quickly determine what special considerations need to be accounted for when creating your document. Will the document contain images or graphics (both color and monochrome/black & white)? >> Refer to: Images & Color Will images or other content go to the edge of a page? >> Refer to: Bleed Will the document be folded or bound? >> Refer to: Margins If the answer is yes to any of the above questions, take additional time to review those sections carefully.
2. Document Setup
Create a new document (Create > New) and choose your page size or create a new page.
Size:
Publisher is does not handle bleeds, so you will need to intentionally add .25 (1/4 inch) to your overall dimensions if your document has a bleed. PrintNinja | 877-396-4652 | www.printninja.com
Copyright 2013 PrintNinja LLC. All rights reserved. PrintNinja is a registered trademark of PrintNinja LLC. The PrintNinja logo and related marks are marks of PrintNinja LLC. This guide is provided as a conveience to PrintNinja customers and while every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, PrintNinja cannot be responsible for any errors or omissions. This guide may contain references and examples that feature products,services or brands that are the intellectual property of others. These are included for illustrative purposes only and those products, services and brands do not endorse this guide or have any association with PrintNinja LLC.
Margins:
Set your margins to at least .25 (1/4 inch) for a publication with no bleed, and .375 (3/8 inch) for documents with a bleed. Do not place any important text or photos in the margin area to avoid cropping. The exception to this is when items will bleed off the border, meaning they go off the edge.
3. Bleeds in Publisher
Bleeds are a often misunderstood concept, but very important in the printing process. Bleed means printing excess color on the edges that will intentionally be cut off. Without bleeds, small, inconsistent white borders appear between the edge of your document which looks unprofessional. Bleeds are always excessthey do not diminish your finished document size. Simply put, if any printed element goes to the edge of your page, a bleed must be included. Publisher does not automatically handle bleeds; this must be done manually as described in section 4. Check your skills: Which of the three documents below must include a bleed? Note: the black lines indicate edges and are not printed.
MAYOR OF LONDON
No bleed needed! All of the printed elements are contained within the margins and stay clear of the edges.
BLEED REQUIRED! Even though 95% of the image is contained in the margins, the black bar with Annual
BLEED REQUIRED! The dark and light gray goes to the edge. This document needs a bleed.
Good to Go!
Everything is properly placed! The photo goes to the outer edge of the paper. The green line designates the bleed, everything outside of this will be intentionally trimmed off.
Examine each image file in a Publisher document by clicking View > Graphics Manager. The tool will appear on the right side of the screen. The Graphics Manager tool allows you to inspect each image element in the document individually to verify resolution and scale. Click on the arrow next to each file name and click Details. Verify that the scaling shows the same percentages for height and width, and that the effective resolution exceeds 300 dpi. If images are not high enough quality, you will either have to: shrink them replace them with alternative images with a higher resolution find the high quality original files Note that while you can take low resolution images into photo editing software such as Photoshop and increase the resolution, the final result is even poorer than the original low quality file. You can not transform a low resolution image into a high resolution image. Simply put: garbage in, garbage out. PrintNinja | 877-396-4652 | www.printninja.com
Copyright 2013 PrintNinja LLC. All rights reserved. PrintNinja is a registered trademark of PrintNinja LLC. The PrintNinja logo and related marks are marks of PrintNinja LLC. This guide is provided as a conveience to PrintNinja customers and while every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, PrintNinja cannot be responsible for any errors or omissions. This guide may contain references and examples that feature products,services or brands that are the intellectual property of others. These are included for illustrative purposes only and those products, services and brands do not endorse this guide or have any association with PrintNinja LLC.
6. Exporting to press
Congratulations, youve successfully made your document and prepared it for press. Its now time to export. Click File > Export and set the export settings to Commercial Press. Click the button and choose the location to save your project. Open your PDF and verify your results. The actual document dimensions should be larger than the actual finished size if it contains a bleed. For example, a US Letter (8.5 x 11) file with a 0.125 (1/8) bleed all the way around should measure 8.75 x 11.25. The excess area will be trimmed away after the press run to produce a US Letter size document. Ensure that the Run Final Publishing Checks box is checked and correct any alerts or issues presented by the tool.